thoughts on Butter

Huh.

I'm not entirely sure I completely got this movie, or that it really accomplished what it was trying to do.  It seems like it might have been trying to be a few different things, didn't go for any of them quite enough, and thus didn't really succeed at any of them.  However, there were enough funny one-liners and enough genuinely bizarre moments that a day after watching it, I find myself chuckling about parts of it in a "What the f*ck was that?" kind of way.

Ty Burrell plays Bob Pickler, who has won the Iowa State Fair butter carving contest fifteen years in a row.  He is asked to step down and give someone else a chance to win, and perhaps be a judge.  His wife, Laura (Jennifer Garner), whose life seems to revolve around this contest and who seems to fancy herself some sort of First Lady even though...you know...it's a butter carving contest that happens once a year, is initially FURIOUS about this ("Those mother f*ckers don't know who they're dealing with!).  She grows even more furious when she catches Bob having sex with a stripper (Olivia Wilde) in their van.  She decides to enter the contest herself.  Her competition at the county level consists of Carol Ann (Laura Schaal), a butter carving contest "groupie" (is there such a thing?) who carves a laughably bad sculpture of kittens in a basket (in her speech explaining her sculpture, she says something along the lines of, "I really love kittens when they're all tangled up in a blanket, but I didn't know how to carve that, so I just put them in a basket instead"); the stripper, Brooke, who basically enters just to mess with Laura; and Destiny (Yara Shahidi), a ten-year-old foster child who has recently been taken in by Jill (Alicia Silverstone) and Ethan (Rob Corddry), a couple with a fridge full of soy products who think that butter carving competitions are "kind of redneck-y."  There is a subplot where Brooke hooks up with Bob's daughter (Ashley Greene) to try to get the $600 (she later raises the price) she says Bob owes her for sex.  There is another subplot where Laura has sex with her high school boyfriend, Boyd Bolton (Hugh Jackman), so that she can get him to help her get a rematch after she loses the initial competition to Destiny.  It all comes to a head at the Iowa State Fair contest.

So...I've read some stuff that said this was supposed to be a political satire, and as Laura, Jennifer Garner dresses and speaks in a sort of Sarah Palin-esque way.  But no one besides her seems to be taking the butter carving contest overly seriously, and she's definitely the only one getting cutthroat and playing dirty about it, so she just comes across as kind of insane, and since her main competition is a ten-year-old girl, it's just kind of like, "Why is she being so mean to that little kid?"  I also read some reviews that suggested that the movie was going for a Christopher Guest Best in Show type thing, but in that movie, the dog show was such a huge part of it; here, the butter carving stuff seems almost arbitrary-- it seems like it's more about how insane competition in general can make some people, but again, Laura is the only one who seems particularly insane about it.  So it's kind of like, "Here's a movie about some crazy lady who's really into this butter carving competition for some reason, and also there's this crazy stripper running around, and also, hey, there's Hugh Jackman as a dumb local car dealer."

That's not to say that this isn't all sometimes kind of fun and funny.  For one thing...this movie is rated R basically just for language, and some of the stuff that comes out of Jennifer Garner's mouth made me laugh just in a "Oh my god, I don't think I've ever heard Jennifer Garner swear before" kind of way (I looked her up on IMDB, and no, it's likely that I haven't.  Besides Alias, she's been in Juno, a few short-lived TV series from the '90s, and some romantic comedies.  A handful of other stuff, too, but nothing that I would imagine would involve a lot of swearing.).  I've also read some stuff about how Olivia Wilde pretty much steals every scene she's in, and that's pretty true; there is one scene where she's riding her bike-- which appears to be a child's dirt bike-- across a football field where a marching band is practicing, and she could easily just ride around the marching band.  Instead, she rides right through them shouting, "Out of my way, bitches!" Why? I don't know, but I laughed.  Also...what is Hugh Jackman doing in this movie? He's seriously in like four scenes, one of which involves staring at Jennifer Garner's boobs and another in which he prays to God to thank him for bringing her to him.  This prayer quickly grows dirty enough that I had another moment of shocked oh-my-god type laughter.

So, bottom line: it was kind of a hot mess of a movie, but it had its moments.  It didn't make a lot of sense, but it was pretty funny.