Spinning Into Butter has taken a few twists and turns on the road to today’s release. Shooting began in October 2005, back when Catherine Crier still had her live show on Court TV, which is part of the movie. It ran aground on financial difficulties but was completed, and was first shown at the Cannes Film Market (not the festival itself) in 2007. It played the second-tier festival circuit and according to the Internet Movie Database bowed in Australia last year—on DVD. Indie distributor Screen Media Films is giving the campus-set drama the old college try in theaters but I suspect home video is its natural market, even with Sarah Jessica Parker on the marquee.
There’s neither sex nor city to be found in Spinning Into Butter, which is based on a play by Rebecca Gilman. The Alabama-born Gilman was the toast of the stage in Chicago, New York, and London from 1999-2002, with a run of successful shows that tackled difficult themes. Boy Gets Girl, which played Off Broadway in 2001, is a chilling piece about stalking. Philip Seymour Hoffman directed stage debutante Anna Paquin and Burn Notice star Jeffrey Donovan in the trailer park melodrama The Glory of Living, a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2001. 2002’s Blue Surge, in which a cop falls in love with a hooker, was less well-received, and though Gilman keeps the faith (she hasn’t parlayed her accolades into lucrative movie and TV gigs) her work has been out of the spotlight since then.
Spinning Into Butter, which she co-adapted with Doug Atchison (the writer-director of Akeelah and the Bee), is a memento of the play that started her hot streak, which I saw at Lincoln Center in 2000. But the briskly paced show has been diluted and Lifetime-d. Gilman’s topic is racism, and the ineffectiveness of political correctness as a response to its corrosion; the play is an antidote to the usual bromides and earnestness that surrounds the topic, and I remember it being rudely funny in spots. If there’s a laugh in the movie, I missed it. The play risks your affection; the movie gives you a backrub. It opens with a Maya Angelou quote—“People do not remember what you say or what you do, over the years, but they never forget how you made them feel”—that pretty much signals that lines will not be crossed. (more…)
