Sometimes you are unfortunate enough to run across a film that simply offends you. Not because it goes too far with its raunch or drops a few too many F-bombs or has more gore than a Manson family picnic. No. Sometimes you are offended because you find the thesis of a heavy-handed message film to be wrong in every way. Such was the case with the half-baked melodrama of Spinning Into Butter. Based upon the play of the same name, this predictable, excessive work showcases the trouble with adapting plays to the big screen and employs a fantastic cast we're never truly allowed to enjoy.

Beyond its trite cliches and decades old rhetoric (based upon a 25-year-old incident), the thesis of the film is a bitter one: that each and every one of us is a racist and we have to wrestle with that. Certainly every character in this film is racist -- every white either afraid of or overly catering to minorities and every minority easily offended and obsessed with their own race of origin. In a play, this is the kind of behavior and characters you expect. A play with a hero who is just and combating the ills of society is usually a bad play. But in a film it is just the opposite. A film loaded with characters you loathe is a bad film -- except in the rarest of cases. Here each character seems to wear their race on their sleeve -- from the "Newyorican" who is offended with the school categorizing him as Hispanic, to the blacks who seem to jump at any mention of the word black by a white character, to the whites trying to diversify the college by filling it with minority students, to the big twist characters who are really just racists deep down. Nowhere is there to be found a character who is indifferent or unaffected by race.

And I found the very concept of this base crass and more than a little offensive. Perhaps ten years ago these ideas might have still carried some weight, what with its origin being in a decade desperately searching for an identity amid its biggest cultural events all involving domestic terror (World Trade Center, Waco, Columbine, and Oklahoma City) and racial tension (the Rodney King and O.J. Simpson trials). But after a decade of transformative change when, as Chris Rock said it best, "You know the world is going crazy when the best rapper is a white guy, the best golfer is a black guy, the tallest guy in the NBA is Chinese, the Swiss hold the America's Cup, France is accusing the U.S. of arrogance, [and] Germany doesn't want to go to war," it is kind of hard to justify a thesis that says we're all wrestling with racism.

Quite the contrary, it appears that racism is a behavior that must be learned, taught, and reinforced to survive. And a film that wants to preach to us before sending us all off with the message that we need to work through our racism seems to have no place in this day and age. In fact, it seems kind of counterproductive -- which might have something to do with the scant $5,000 it made on four screens before being dumped on DVD for the rest of us to ignore. Even the terrific cast -- Sarah Jessica Parker, Beau Bridges, and Forrest Gump's Mykelti Williamson (Bubba!) -- doesn't make this worth gritting your teeth through. Perhaps if this had been set in the time of the actual event (1983) it would have been easier to stomach, as it could serve as a slice of life from a period when these issues were at the forefront of our minds. Instead it is set in modern times with modern themes and is simply a waste.

To make matters worse, it is really dull, takes a while to get to its point, and poorly hides a number of twists that become pretty apparent long before they are revealed. A thoroughly frustrating lecture without (thankfully) a single special feature -- not even a trailer.

Spinning into Butter is available now from Screen Media Films.

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