Butter, a quirky comedy starring
Jennifer Garner,
Ty Burrell,
Olivia Wilde , and
Hugh Jackman that premieres next week at the
Toronto International Film Festival, was always destined to garner attention — it’s a high-profile movie about competitive butter carving!
With no prior experience in butter carving at all, Mrs. Pickler decides that she’s going to take the sculpting tools into her own hands. “She enters the competition, and when she goes to sign up, she finds herself signing up at the same time as this 10 year-old black orphan girl [Destiny, played by Yara Shahidi], who is prodigiously talented,” the director explains. Destiny and Laura quickly become intense butter-carving rivals. “When you start to peel away the layers of the movie, you realize that there’s a lot of political metaphor to the movie,” continues Smith. “Bill Clinton was this much-loved president, who maybe was not so discreet with his sexual love, and Hillary stood in the shadows very quietly supporting him. After his two terms were up, there was a sense of Hillary saying, ‘My turn now.’“And then, the year she runs for president, Barack Obama, this young upstart, comes along, and there’s a sense of Hillary being like, ‘Really?’ That was very much the metaphor that Jason Micallef was aiming for when he wrote the script originally. Obviously, there’s some fairly unsubtle links to the fact that the movie is set in Iowa.” (For those of you who avoid politics, the Iowa State Fair, where Butter actually filmed for one week during 2010, has become a major political stomping ground for presidential hopefuls seeking support in the Iowa caucuses.)Smith was quick to add that the film is not any sort of angry, pointed satire, and that even without any focus on the political subtext, Butter functions as a goofy comedy. Well, color us intrigued!
