Spare us the Butter

Ooh, aren't political allegories clever? Yes, they are. Ever so clever indeed. Like Albert Einstein juggling hand grenades while standing on his head and singing Kung Fu Fighting. Take Butter for example. Ostensibly this high-placed finisher in the 2008 Black List is about butter-sculpting. In reality, it is all about the politics. Obama versus Hillary to be precise.

Butter is gearing up for a 17 April start date, with the Weinstein Company and former New Line boss Michael De Luca reportedly getting busy as they try to fill out the cast of their baby ahead of the commencement of principal photography. Jennifer Garner has been attached for a while now, and there was chatter yesterday that she could be joined by two other actors who are equally not always the most welcome of sights for film fans; they being Jim Carrey and Kate Hudson. Vulture cite those ubiquitous and relentlessly flappy-jawed 'insiders' as claiming that Carrey is in 'discussions' to star in Butter, while Hudson is somewhat nautically described as 'negotiating to come aboard'. Securing both stars may not be all smooth sailing though, with Movieline reporting that while Hudson is still considering whether to enlist, Carrey has definitely passed.

If the latter rumour does prove to be veraciously airtight then this would not exactly represent a wellspring of bleakly harrowing regret. Carrey has hardly been on top form since Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, with Yes Man in particular having irked this writer like a big fat hungry grub drunkenly moonwalking round the space between muscle and skin. Feebler than an imaginary baby entering a power-lifting contest, and stupider than a stegosaurus whose brain had been transplanted out and replaced with a polystyrene facsimile of a French fry, Peyton Reed's supposed comedy somehow contrived to make Liar Liar appear as mind-blowingly witty and original as the first human being ever to tell a joke in the history of the entire world ever. And while we're vaguely hopping round the topic, why exactly does Yes Man participant Zooey Deschanel remain so critically beloved in spite of some truly abysmal movie choices? The aforementioned outing with Carrey, plus The Happening was a one-two salvo of crud that surely would have seen the wheelie bin of opprobrium emptied over most other actresses. Yet Deschanel somehow passed through both stinkfests like a Teflon-coated eel. Could that be down to the fact she starred in Gigantic and (500) Days of Summer - both of which saw the tragically adolescent daydream of vaguely alternative hottie copping off with geek tediously unfurled across the screen for the trillionth time, thereby delighting an overwhelmingly male-dominated movie press in the process? Er, yes. That's almost certainly it.

Speaking of geeks, hotties, tiresome male fantasies, and general affronts to originality, the just-out-in-the-States She's Out Of my League yields up a director to Butter, as the British helmer of the former Jim Field Smith is due to take charge of the latter (stepping in after Lars and the Real Girl's Craig Gillespie dropped out). The Butter script which attracted so much attention was written by Jason Micallef and a review of it is available on ScriptShadow, who describe the essential premise as follows:

'12 year-old Destiny, a black girl who can’t understand why white people act the way they do, has been passed around from foster home to foster home, never quite finding the right fit. Her latest foster parents, Jill and Ethan, are seemingly perfect yet somewhat dysfunctional white suburbanites. Oh, and Destiny is a brilliant butter sculptor. As is the husband of feisty, bitch-on-wheels Laura Pickler. Bob’s his name, and no one has or will ever beat him in the annual butter sculpting competition. (They all live in Iowa, where butter sculpting competitions are very serious business.) When Orval, the main judge of the Iowa State Mastery in Butter Committee, asks Bob to step down this year and give someone else a shot, Laura gets mighty pissed. So pissed that she berates Bob endlessly when he won’t fight the decision. And then she decides to take butter into her own hands and enter the competition herself, at which point she becomes an archnemesis of sorts for Destiny.'

Politely sidestepping the (certainly to a UK native) bewildering concept of competitive butter-sculpting, it is the Iowa setting which provides the critical notification of the nature of Butter's satirical objectives, with the script playing as a dairy-centric retread of the 2008 Democratic Presidential caucus in that state. Taking place in January, that was the first caucus in the contest to win the party nomination for November's presidential election, and it saw Barack Obama spring an upset as he triumphed over rivals John Edwards and Hillary Clinton, announcing himself as a serious contender for the Big Job in the process. Micallef's scenario casts Obama as Destiny, while the Clintons are Bob (the role Carrey is being mooted for) and Laura (Garner). Hudson would apparently play Bob's mistress.

The synergy between the semi-serious politics of reality and the butter-sculpting of fiction seems as though it may be a little on the woolly side (Bill Clinton didn't exactly get asked to stand down so someone else could have a crack at being Prez), and the screenplay engendered oppositional responses from the two ScriptShadow correspondents – with one describing it as 'too cute for its own good, quirky for the sake of being quirky, and preachy enough to start its own congregation', while the other thought it had 'that irresistible Little Miss Sunshine indie charm. The characters all come alive on the page, worming their various ways into our heart valves like so much cholesterol.' Ugh. A coronary threatens.

A genuine irony seems to come with another Butter casting rumour, with Will Smith's daughter Willow being linked to the role of 12-year-old Destiny. That's right, the underdog threatening to upset the old established order could be played by the offspring of the world's most colossally huge movie superstar. Only in America, eh?