Garner in Butter.

Butter hasn’t had this much attention on the screen since Marlon Brando thought up new X-rated things to do with dairy products in Last Tango in Paris. No artery clogging to fear in the clumsy, uneven farce called Butter either. Like The Oranges, it first appeared a year ago, at the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival, and it’s been on the shelf ever since, yellowing with age until it looks more like margarine.

The first hour of Butter is funny, irreverent and full of satirical promise about America’s obsession with greed and competition. The targets of its parody are often more vulgar than clever, but before it eventually falls apart and hits the frying pan, it paints a picture of American home economics that is occasionally hilarious. This time the prize worth killing for is not the World Series trophy or the Miss America crown, but a championship blue ribbon in the competitive cutthroat world of—are you ready?—butter carving! In the profound state of Iowa, where corn comes from, Bob and Laura Dean Pickler, the royal family of butter, have an unbeaten record for creating masterpieces like a complete re-creation of Schindler’s List and a legendary life-size replica of The Last Supper, which the Des Moines Register called “better than the original!”

But now, after a 15-year winning streak, the judges decide it is time to pass the crown on to somebody new, forcing Bob Pickler (Ty Burrell) to reluctantly hang up his butter knife. “It’s time to give back,” he says—“like Oprah.” This is an unacceptable defeat for his wife Laura (Jennifer Garner), who has always dreamed butter would someday lead to the White House, and for whom losing is out of the question. So without much experience (it was Bob who did all the work carving Newt Gingrich and a T. rex eating a girl) she embarks on a ruthless mission to enter the Jackson County Butter Carving Competition by herself and restore the family legacy. Her only two serious opponents are a 10-year-old black orphan girl named Destiny (Yara Shahidi), whose proud but clueless adoptive parents (Rob Corddry and Alicia Silverstone) egg her on, oblivious to what awaits their new daughter in a contest ruled by rednecks, and a tattooed goth hooker (Olivia Wilde) who enters the race disguised as a born-again Christian. Let the one-liners begin.

The screenplay by Jason Micallef rocks along like a broad, razor-sharp parody of screwball American values in a mean-spirited skit on Saturday Night Live, but due to the over-the-top direction of Jim Field Smith, the barbs don’t always hit their mark. Midway through the contest, the movie turns downright crude when the foul-mouthed prostitute seduces the Picklers’ restless, cynical teenage daughter—who grouses, “I can’t wait for everyone to just die from global warming,” but delights in lesbian sex with surprising enthusiasm. More shock arrives with a guest appearance by multitalented cover boy Hugh Jackman as an oversexed, pot-bellied (!) used-car dealer in a cowboy hat, dispatched by Laura to sabotage the little girl’s chance of winning in exchange for some lurid humping of his own. The hooker also goes to bed with uptight, straight-laced Bob, Laura goes to bed with her old high school lover, and the movie turns sentimental when the judges turn to marshmallow after some villain breaks into the State Fair butter pavilion and melts the sculpture of the soft-spoken child, who seems to be the only African-American in Iowa. (You can just imagine what a blowtorch does to Land O’Lakes.) The best thing about Butter is the discovery of an eviscerating talent in first-time scriptwriter Jason Micallef. He cuts through the cracker barrel eccentricities of Grain Belt humor as easily as a knife slices through a baked potato. And it’s good to see Jennifer Garner tackle the farcical elements; her clothes and speech and political bulldozer Tea Party fearlessness is a whimsical sendup of Sarah Palin. Unfortunately, the absurdity falters sadly in the final showdown, and all attempts to make sly comments about race, class and age differences collapse.

The film was shot in Louisiana, which looks nothing like Iowa. Nobody along the way seems to have a care in the world about cholesterol. And it’s the first movie in history that makes Hugh Jackman look repulsive. But the take-home moral of the movie is that butter carving makes for a great contest. If you don’t win it, you can always eat it.

rreed@observer.com

BUTTER

Running Time 99 minutes

Written by Jason A. Micallef

Directed by Jim Field Smith

Starring Jennifer Garner, Yara Shahidi and Ty Burrell

2/4

Olivia Wilde, Harvey Weinstein at 'Butter' (PMc)

Last night at the Cinema Society's after party for the premiere of the dark satire Butter, The Observer found Animal Practice's Justin Kirk lounging around on one of the black leather couches at Double 7, just one day after his show's second episode.

Animal Practice has been getting a lot of love, so much so that New York magazine dedicated four whole pages in this week's issue to its star. Not to Mr. Kirk--who had just finished up the last season of Weeds, on which he stole the show as Nancy Botwin's free-spirited brother-in-law Andy--but to Crystal, a capuchin monkey who earns $12,000 per episode on the NBC hit.

We just had to ask ... did Mr. Kirk feel a tiny bit jealous of all the monkey business?

"Whatever, I've been in New York magazine before," the actor replied with faux bravado.

"It's been great working with Crystal; she's bringing a lot of good press to the show, and the whole cast has just been so fun to work with." Mr. Kirk had adopted the glazed-eyed monotone of someone who's just been on too many junkets. We waited.

"Honestly, the whole press thing has been such a circus. I'm just glad that the episodes are now airing, and that the whole show can just ..." He held his arm out straight and dipped it up and down.

"You know."

We couldn't resist. "Has it literally been a circus?"

Mr. Kirk smiled and rolled his eyes. "Yes, yes. Gotta love the monkey."

Meanwhile, the movie's stars Ty Burrell, Alicia Silverstone, Yara Shahidi, Olivia Wilde and Jennifer Garner all made entrances at the nightclub (only Ashley Greene and Rob Corddry dipped after the screening), along with Dominic Cooper and Kelly Bensimon.

There was a noticeable tension between Ms. Garner, wearing a hip-hugging red dress, and Ms. Wilde, in a flowing green gown: the two never posed together for pictures, sat at opposite tables all night, and didn't so much as look at each other, while their publicists hovered by their clients' arms, shooting wary eye-daggers in each other's general direction.

Butter's director, Jim Field Smith, was holding court near the bar. Before the film, we had snuck in late and stood in the back of the theater as Mr. Smith introduced the movie, using a very complicated roller-coaster metaphor that we won't even try to recreate here. When he got to the part about it being a a subversive, dark satire, producer Harvey Weinstein turned to us and agreed: "That's true, it's very subversive."

The British Mr. Smith is best known for Matt LeBlanc's comeback on his show Episodes, another "dark, subversive satire" about American culture, as seen through the eyes of two British screenwriters who move to Hollywood and clash with all the oafish, West Coast stereotypes. As his new movie is an Election-style commentary on the politics of the Iowa State Fair butter-carving contest, we wanted to know one thing.

"Why do you hate America so much?"

"I don't!" He exclaimed. "Look, when it comes to elections and government politics, the British are even more insane than you guys. I like America. I think the film redeems the culture that at first you think it's making fun of."

(To be fair, despite Mr. Weinstein's statement, Butter is not that dark or subversive, although it does qualify as a satire.)

And what about that five minute roller-coaster metaphor speech?

"Oh God, what was I going on about with that?" He moaned. "I don't even like roller coasters."

We didn't bother asking how he felt about monkeys.

Plame, the attractive blond secret agent who made a fool out of Dick Cheney after disclosing the truth about the fact that there were no "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq, and her husband, Joe Wilson (Sean Penn), a former ambassador to Niger under President Clinton who dispelled the false rumors circulated by the State Department that Niger was selling uranium to Saddam Hussein to build a nuclear bomb, were labeled traitors. When the White House declared war on Iraq and ignored Joe's investigative reports that no uranium purchase ever took place, he wrote a New York Times editorial about the lies the Bush-Cheney administration was feeding the American public and all hell broke loose. Retaliating against her husband's disagreement with the government, the Bush gang leaked Valerie's secret C.I.A. status to the Washington press, destroying her career, endangering her life, and nearly wrecking her marriage.

Defending her integrity after so many of her informants in the Middle East were promised jobs in the U.S. and protection for their families, then deserted by the State Department, she took a long time to lick her wounds and follow her husband's advice to speak up in Congress. Valerie and Joe each wrote books, and the result was a blizzard of  political articles that reversed the world's opinion of America's illegal invasion of Iraq, plunging a big chunk of the Bush administration into Congressional ethics investigations and criminal indictments, or landing them in jail. Valerie Plame ended up a heroine in pearls, and the Bush administration remains to many a disgrace that polarized the nation and slaughtered the economy.

Fair Game attempts to open the file on this ugly and complex chapter in American history with a steady stream of revelations, but while the result is politically sobering, it is also cinematically awkward. 

 Full of crypto-C.I.A. jargon that only succeeds in confusing the audience, the script by Jez and John-Henry Butterworth hits the ground running, with Valerie leaving the house at 3:45 a.m., saying she's going to Cleveland and ending up in Amman, leaving instructions on Post-Its. When a scene finally arrives in which overdue explanations are declared, everyone talks at once, rendering coherence impossible. The actors have all been indulged by director Doug Liman to mumble.  Important interrogations of Iraqi weapons experts are infuriatingly garbled, C.I.A. motivations and strategy unexplained. The C.I.A. flies into damage-assessment mode, covering for the White House by firing their best spy, with the lives of her 15 top sources in Baghdad hanging in the balance; the people who trusted her accuse her of betrayal; the press has a field day; and the F.B.I. launches a criminal probe to reveal the identity of the culprit on Capitol Hill who leaked the classified information about Valerie. Scooter Libby? Karl Rove? Dick Armitage? While Valerie Plame becomes "fair game" (hence the title), the list of suspects who broadsided her add up to the ingredients of a top-notch espionage thriller, but her escape from the C.I.A. building is nothing more than a ludicrous restaging of Angelina Jolie's same scene in Salt.

 Naomi Watts is credible, and Sean Penn is battered and über-intense, but no real electricity or suspense builds, even when their lives are in jeopardy and their marriage in shards. Her case, corrupted by a troubled administration of meatheads and distorted by the press, became a good example of America's long history of promising democracy to the disenfranchised and then taking it back. The Bush gang falsified evidence supporting the theory that Iraq was ready to nuke us, then coerced the C.I.A. into rubber-stamping the lies. Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson were in the middle; everything they stood for was on the line. Her redemption is a story worth telling and Fair Game is an important exposé of corrupt political power gone toxic. It's good enough that it deserves to be better.

rreed@observer.com

FAIR GAME
Running time 106 minutes
Written by Jez and John-Henry Butterworth
Directed by Doug Liman
Starring Naomi Watts, Sean Penn, Ty Burrell, Sam Shepard

3/4

On the one hand, I thought the brilliantly unsettling Danish movie might make a great play. This staggering story of a family reunion, I thought, is just what we need in the theater. Every actor in the film was exceptional too, even perfect. But there was no reason to think that fine stage actors couldn’t equal them.

On the other hand, I didn’t see how any English play version could possibly live up to the film, which had riveted and disturbed me. What made the experience even more memorable is that I first came across the film by farcical accident: I’d gone to see another movie at my local cineplex and strolled into the wrong theater by mistake. Yet within five minutes, I was utterly hooked.

A family gathers for a banquet in a grand house to celebrate the 60th birthday of a beloved, formidable patriarch. ( Festen is Danish for “celebration.”) I took it all as quite normal at first, as all family gatherings are quite normal—provided that what might be discovered beneath the complaisant surface is never revealed.

The Festen family includes Christian, the quiet, sullen eldest son, whose twin sister—we learn—has died. Christian’s surviving sister, Helene, is the family dropout, and their younger brother Michael is the nasty second-rater who’s unhappily married. There’s also the paterfamilias’ wife, an icy beauty, dotty grandparents and many guests. And there’s a certain forced bonhomie, an undercurrent that all might not be well—but nothing obvious.

Then everything changes during the banquet when Christian taps his glass and stands to make the first toast to his father. The substance of the chilling speech—which starts out like any affectionate memory of childhood—is that the father sexually abused his children.

Festen is a tragedy of keeping up appearances that unravels before our wide eyes. The celebration staggers on in denial and disbelief, like a drunken nightmare that somehow plugs into us all until we’re left as unnerved and wrecked as the damaged family before us.

I’m afraid it isn’t just that the Festen on Broadway fails to live up to the film. It simply doesn’t come close. From the outset, David Eldridge, the adaptor, and director Rufus Norris—who also staged the London production—have blundered badly. Their set-up is artily wrong. The play opens in self-conscious shadow and blackness. What happened to the celebration? The stark set itself is an empty space with a wall of oppressive black brick. It’s as if we’re in some kind of prison yard. (A symbolic prison of the mind, no doubt.) But all this obvious spookiness—accompanied by ghostly entrances and exits, if you please—pre-empts everything that should naturally unfold.

So does the echoing sound of a child giggling as she splashes in a bath. And what, considering the play’s unspeakable theme, could be more blatant than that? But when a mysterious letter is conveniently found hidden in a ceiling lamp (of all places), the die is cast.

There’s fatally no sense of the apparently normal. (There’s no atmosphere of any guest rooms, either—only a cumbersome center-stage bed on which far too much action takes place.) Mr. Norris handles the banquet scenes well, though not the rowdy group songs and chants that should turn sinister. The tone is all wrong: Everyone should be on the edge of a precipice, including us. But we’re not, and more to the point, they’re not.

It’s staggering. Almost everyone in the cast is either bewilderingly off form or plain wrong for the role. I’m reliably told that the London cast was riveting (and disguised the play’s flaws). But there’s no emotional connection or even conviction within the mixed bag that calls itself an ensemble here.

Larry Bryggman is unable to convey the blustering nastiness of a tyrannical patriarch—least of all any concealed panic. There’s no fire in him, no nuance. He mostly smiles his way through, as if to be merely stunned were enough. But then, Michael Hayden’s Christian is merely immobilized, stolid, dull—without subtext. He’s a limited actor at the best of times. TV star Julianna Margulies fares little better as Helene and plays two notes: histrionic or blandly calm. Jeremy Sisto as the failure, Michael, has been allowed to go completely over the top from start to finish. He leaves the excellent Carrie Preston as his coarse wife nothing to do but shout louder. Let’s leave the still-beautiful Ali MacGraw as the self-denying matriarch out of this.

This woeful stage production of Festen has managed to reduce a riveting tragedy to a mediocre Gothic melodrama, a farce, a shadowy, distant memory of the real thing.

See the film.

Wittgenstein’s Wisdom

A brief word of thanks, at least, for a wonderfully acted, awfully underestimated play. Show People, by the immensely gifted Paul Weitz, is a welcome, unexpectedly frothy comedy and affectionate valentine to theater. Those humorless killjoys called critics whom I’ve read on the play dismissed it as too insubstantial. But wasn’t it Wittgenstein who said that you can’t ask a light soufflé to be Eugene O’Neill?

It was. You can ask a soufflé to be Noel Coward. And what might be called the postmodern Cowardesque is what Mr. Weitz has conjured up in his drawing-room comedy at the Second Stage Theatre. There’s even a deliberately old-fashioned proscenium—a reminder of another theater age—framing Reidi Eitiger’s ultramodern Montauk beach house with the faux ocean in the background and the burning logs in the video fireplace.

It was when one of the actors warmed his hands on the video fire that I was sold on this witty piece. If we want to get fancy, it’s about the nature of reality and illusion. But let’s not. Show People is about happy families and those poor, underemployed things called actors.

Mr. Weitz’s happily absurd twists and turns of the plot—which I ought not reveal—spring from a loopily tantalizing premise. Two elderly, unemployed professional actors, Jerry and Marnie, have been hired by a wealthy young man to pretend to be his loving parents.

There! I was laughing from the start. Tom has hired the nice parents in order to impress his violin-playing fiance, Natalie. You need first-rate actors to play second-rate actors, and we’re blessed with Debra Monk and Lawrence Pressman as Tom’s frequently bewildered parents. Ty Burrell and Judy Greer complete the excellent quartet. As for Show People’s playwright, Mr. Weitz, he appears to be making it up as he goes along, which is what playwrights usually do.

Sometimes it shows—and, to be sure, there’s more than a touch of Pirandello (with a dash of Edward Albee thrown in). But as I see it, Mr. Weitz and his very accomplished director, Peter Askin, have given us a smashing light comedy that’s essentially about theater. Thank goodness Mr. Weitz takes romantic, ridiculous pleasure in it—as we do in his delightful Show People.

On the one hand, I thought the brilliantly unsettling Danish movie might make a great play. This staggering story of a family reunion, I thought, is just what we need in the theater. Every actor in the film was exceptional too, even perfect. But there was no reason to think that fine stage actors couldn’t equal them.

On the other hand, I didn’t see how any English play version could possibly live up to the film, which had riveted and disturbed me. What made the experience even more memorable is that I first came across the film by farcical accident: I’d gone to see another movie at my local cineplex and strolled into the wrong theater by mistake. Yet within five minutes, I was utterly hooked.

A family gathers for a banquet in a grand house to celebrate the 60th birthday of a beloved, formidable patriarch. (Festen is Danish for “celebration.”) I took it all as quite normal at first, as all family gatherings are quite normal—provided that what might be discovered beneath the complaisant surface is never revealed.

The Festen family includes Christian, the quiet, sullen eldest son, whose twin sister—we learn—has died. Christian’s surviving sister, Helene, is the family dropout, and their younger brother Michael is the nasty second-rater who’s unhappily married. There’s also the paterfamilias’ wife, an icy beauty, dotty grandparents and many guests. And there’s a certain forced bonhomie, an undercurrent that all might not be well—but nothing obvious.

Then everything changes during the banquet when Christian taps his glass and stands to make the first toast to his father. The substance of the chilling speech—which starts out like any affectionate memory of childhood—is that the father sexually abused his children.

Festen is a tragedy of keeping up appearances that unravels before our wide eyes. The celebration staggers on in denial and disbelief, like a drunken nightmare that somehow plugs into us all until we’re left as unnerved and wrecked as the damaged family before us.

I’m afraid it isn’t just that the Festen on Broadway fails to live up to the film. It simply doesn’t come close. From the outset, David Eldridge, the adaptor, and director Rufus Norris—who also staged the London production—have blundered badly. Their set-up is artily wrong. The play opens in self-conscious shadow and blackness. What happened to the celebration? The stark set itself is an empty space with a wall of oppressive black brick. It’s as if we’re in some kind of prison yard. (A symbolic prison of the mind, no doubt.) But all this obvious spookiness—accompanied by ghostly entrances and exits, if you please—pre-empts everything that should naturally unfold.

So does the echoing sound of a child giggling as she splashes in a bath. And what, considering the play’s unspeakable theme, could be more blatant than that? But when a mysterious letter is conveniently found hidden in a ceiling lamp (of all places), the die is cast.

There’s fatally no sense of the apparently normal. (There’s no atmosphere of any guest rooms, either—only a cumbersome center-stage bed on which far too much action takes place.) Mr. Norris handles the banquet scenes well, though not the rowdy group songs and chants that should turn sinister. The tone is all wrong: Everyone should be on the edge of a precipice, including us. But we’re not, and more to the point, they’re not.

It’s staggering. Almost everyone in the cast is either bewilderingly off form or plain wrong for the role. I’m reliably told that the London cast was riveting (and disguised the play’s flaws). But there’s no emotional connection or even conviction within the mixed bag that calls itself an ensemble here.

Larry Bryggman is unable to convey the blustering nastiness of a tyrannical patriarch—least of all any concealed panic. There’s no fire in him, no nuance. He mostly smiles his way through, as if to be merely stunned were enough. But then, Michael Hayden’s Christian is merely immobilized, stolid, dull—without subtext. He’s a limited actor at the best of times. TV star Julianna Margulies fares little better as Helene and plays two notes: histrionic or blandly calm. Jeremy Sisto as the failure, Michael, has been allowed to go completely over the top from start to finish. He leaves the excellent Carrie Preston as his coarse wife nothing to do but shout louder. Let’s leave the still-beautiful Ali MacGraw as the self-denying matriarch out of this.

This woeful stage production of Festen has managed to reduce a riveting tragedy to a mediocre Gothic melodrama, a farce, a shadowy, distant memory of the real thing.

See the film.

Wittgenstein’s Wisdom

A brief word of thanks, at least, for a wonderfully acted, awfully underestimated play. Show People, by the immensely gifted Paul Weitz, is a welcome, unexpectedly frothy comedy and affectionate valentine to theater. Those humorless killjoys called critics whom I’ve read on the play dismissed it as too insubstantial. But wasn’t it Wittgenstein who said that you can’t ask a light soufflé to be Eugene O’Neill?

It was. You can ask a soufflé to be Noel Coward. And what might be called the postmodern Cowardesque is what Mr. Weitz has conjured up in his drawing-room comedy at the Second Stage Theatre. There’s even a deliberately old-fashioned proscenium—a reminder of another theater age—framing Reidi Eitiger’s ultramodern Montauk beach house with the faux ocean in the background and the burning logs in the video fireplace.

It was when one of the actors warmed his hands on the video fire that I was sold on this witty piece. If we want to get fancy, it’s about the nature of reality and illusion. But let’s not. Show People is about happy families and those poor, underemployed things called actors.

Mr. Weitz’s happily absurd twists and turns of the plot—which I ought not reveal—spring from a loopily tantalizing premise. Two elderly, unemployed professional actors, Jerry and Marnie, have been hired by a wealthy young man to pretend to be his loving parents.

There! I was laughing from the start. Tom has hired the nice parents in order to impress his violin-playing fiance, Natalie. You need first-rate actors to play second-rate actors, and we’re blessed with Debra Monk and Lawrence Pressman as Tom’s frequently bewildered parents. Ty Burrell and Judy Greer complete the excellent quartet. As for Show People’s playwright, Mr. Weitz, he appears to be making it up as he goes along, which is what playwrights usually do.

Sometimes it shows—and, to be sure, there’s more than a touch of Pirandello (with a dash of Edward Albee thrown in). But as I see it, Mr. Weitz and his very accomplished director, Peter Askin, have given us a smashing light comedy that’s essentially about theater. Thank goodness Mr. Weitz takes romantic, ridiculous pleasure in it—as we do in his delightful Show People.