Spinning Into Butter is a 2007

2007 in film

This is a list of major films released in 2007.-Top grossing films:Please note that following the tradition of the English-language film industry, these are the top grossing films that were first released in the USA in 2007...

 drama film

Drama film

A drama film is a film genre that depends mostly on in-depth development of realistic characters dealing with emotional themes. Dramatic themes such as alcoholism, drug addiction, infidelity, moral dilemmas, racial prejudice, religious intolerance, poverty, class divisions, violence against women...

, written by Rebecca Gilman

Rebecca Gilman

Rebecca Gilman is an American playwright. She attended Middlebury College, graduated from Birmingham-Southern College, and earned a Master of Fine Arts from the Iowa Playwrights Workshop at the University of Iowa...

 and loosely based on her play of the same title

Spinning Into Butter

Spinning Into Butter is a play by American playwright Rebecca Gilman. The play debuted at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago in 1999. It was later produced at the Lincoln Center and the Royal Court Theatre, was named one of the best plays of 1999 by Time, and eventually became the third-most-produced...

. It was directed by first-time director Mark Brokaw

Mark Brokaw

Mark Brokaw is a stage director. He won the Drama Desk Award, Obie Award and Lucille Lortel Award as Outstanding Director of a Play for How I Learned to Drive.Brokaw was raised in Aledo, Illinois and graduated from the Yale Drama School...

 and produced by Sarah Jessica Parker

Sarah Jessica Parker

Sarah Jessica Parker is an American film, television, and theater actress and producer.She is best known for her leading role as Carrie Bradshaw on the HBO television series Sex and the City , for which she won four Golden Globe Awards, three Screen Actors Guild Awards, and two Emmy Awards...

, who also stars in the film. Spinning Into Butter premiered at the Cannes Film Market on May 17, 2007 and opened in the U.S. in March, 2009.
The film concerns political correctness

Political correctness

Political correctness is a term which denotes language, ideas, policies, and behavior seen as seeking to minimize social and institutional offense in occupational, gender, racial, cultural, sexual orientation, certain other religions, beliefs or ideologies, disability, and age-related contexts,...

 and racial identity.

Plot

When a New England liberal arts college

Liberal arts

The term liberal arts refers to those subjects which in classical antiquity were considered essential for a free citizen to study. Grammar, Rhetoric and Logic were the core liberal arts. In medieval times these subjects were extended to include mathematics, geometry, music and astronomy...

 experiences a hate crime

Hate crime

In crime and law, hate crimes occur when a perpetrator targets a victim because of his or her perceived membership in a certain social group, usually defined by racial group, religion, sexual orientation, disability, class, ethnicity, nationality, age, gender, gender identity, social status or...

 against one of its few black students, the school's dean of students

Dean (education)

In academic administration, a dean is a person with significant authority over a specific academic unit, or over a specific area of concern, or both...

 (Parker) must respond publicly to the incident while privately confronting her own latent racism

Racism

Racism is the belief that inherent different traits in human racial groups justify discrimination. In the modern English language, the term "racism" is used predominantly as a pejorative epithet. It is applied especially to the practice or advocacy of racial discrimination of a pernicious nature...

 and prejudice

Prejudice

Prejudice is making a judgment or assumption about someone or something before having enough knowledge to be able to do so with guaranteed accuracy, or "judging a book by its cover"...

.

Principal cast

• Sarah Jessica Parker
  Sarah Jessica Parker
  Sarah Jessica Parker is an American film, television, and theater actress and producer.She is best known for her leading role as Carrie Bradshaw on the HBO television series Sex and the City , for which she won four Golden Globe Awards, three Screen Actors Guild Awards, and two Emmy Awards...
  
   as Sarah Daniels
• Miranda Richardson
  Miranda Richardson
  Miranda Jane Richardson is an English stage, film and television actor. She has been nominated for two Academy Awards, and has won two Golden Globes and a BAFTA during her career....
  
   as Catherine Kenney
• Beau Bridges
  Beau Bridges
  Lloyd Vernet "Beau" Bridges III is an American actor and director.- Early life :Bridges was born in Los Angeles, the son of actor Lloyd Bridges and his college sweetheart, Dorothy Bridges . He was nicknamed "Beau" by his mother and father after Ashley Wilkes's son in Gone with the Wind, the book...
  
   as Burton Strauss
• Mykelti Williamson
  Mykelti Williamson
  Michael T. "Mykelti" Williamson is an American actor best known for his role as Benjamin Buford Blue in the 1994 film Forrest Gump, as Detective Bobby "Fearless" Smith in the critically acclaimed but commercially unsuccessful crime drama Boomtown, and recently for appearing as the head of CTU for...
  
   as Aaron Carmicheal

Reception

As of March 2010, the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes

Rotten Tomatoes

Rotten Tomatoes is a website devoted to reviews, information, and news of films—widely known as a film review aggregator. Its name derives from the cliché of audiences throwing tomatoes and other vegetables at a poor stage performance...

reported that 16% of critics gave the film positive reviews, based on 31 reviews with an average score of 3.6/10. The site's consensus of reviews was:

"Both leaden and stilted, Spinning into Butter is an unsubtle drama with stagy direction and lackluster dialogue."