Movie Review: 'Butter' -- 1.5 stars

Butter
1.5 stars
Directed by Jim Field Smith
Starring Jennifer Garner, Ty Burrell, Alicia Silverstone, Olivia Wilde, Yara Shahidi
Rated R

"Butter" is a wheezy satire about a Sarah Palin-type that would have been right at home in 2008, but seems hopelessly dated now. The portrait of stuck-up Midwesterner Laura Pickler (Jennifer Garner) and her adventures in butter carving is full of tired references to the once-relevant Palin and dark comedy that's so obvious it flattens from the start and never recovers.

Iowan Laura is married to champion butter artist Bob Pickler ("Modern Family's" Ty Burrell), who is famed for his Last Supper rendering, among many others constructed with the gooey spread. Laura has ridden his coattails to a position of prominence in their community, so she doesn't take it too kindly when Bob is pushed aside for some fresh blood.

She responds to the snub by entering the annual Iowa State Fair butter carving competition herself, where she competes with an unexpectedly stiff challenger: 10-year-old foster daughter Destiny (Yara Shahidi).

The film, directed by Jim Field Smith, drips with condescension in its treatment of the protagonist, who is played by Garner as a monstrous opportunist, a "real American" nightmare with a folksy accent and cutthroat attitude. At the same time, Destiny, wielding a worn out suitcase, is such an old-fashioned portrait of adolescent perfection that it seems like she materialized straight out of a Shirley Temple movie. It's not hard to pick a side in this showdown.

The movie tries to be edgy, incorporating a bad boy Hugh Jackman and Olivia Wilde as an over-the-top exotic dancer out for cash, but it just seems self-conscious. Not that it matters: With Palin, the movie's thinly disguised object of derision, now operating on the fringe of mainstream culture, the entire film feels like yesterday's news.