'Spinning Into Butter'

McClatchy Newspapers (MCT) - "Spinning Into Butter," a stage production about the knotty issues of race at a liberal-arts university, was an acclaimed success when it debuted in 1999. A decade later and "Butter" has curdled into a well-intentioned but talky and overly obvious film that fees like "Crash, College Edition."

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Sarah Jessica Parker slips off her Manolo Blahniks, climbs out of Mr. Big's "Sex and the City" limo, and slides behind the wheel of a Subaru to play Sarah Daniels, a dean at fictional Belmont College in picturesque northern Vermont. Life is easy, like the cover of a campus catalog, until a shy black freshman, Simon (Paul James), becomes the victim of anonymous hate crimes.

The actions rip the lid off simmering tensions at bucolic Belmont where both whites and blacks, professors and students, see the same events through the prism of their own self-interest and warring agendas. No doubt, the issues raised are still valid ones, even if "post-racial" is one of the buzzwords of the current day.

Unfortunately, playwright Rebecca Gilman's dialog probably worked better on the stage than on film where it comes across less like believable conversation than strident speechifying. Gilman (who co-wrote the script) and director Mark Brokaw do their best to open up the play and make it filmic but too much of the time everyone's standing around talking at each other. This is especially true in the exchanges between Sarah and black TV reporter Aaron Carmichael (Mykelti Williamson) who is more of a plot device than a character.

The rest of the cast _ including James Rebhorn as the flustered college president, Beau Bridges and Miranda Richardson as panicky fellow deans, and Daniel Eric Gold ("Ugly Betty") and Victor Rasuk ("ER") as students, and Paul James _ do well with what they have to work with. But the biggest lesson from "Spinning Into Butter" has nothing to do with the ethics of race and more with realizing that every hit play doesn't need to be turned into a movie.

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'SPINNING INTO BUTTER'

Grade: C plus

R (language); 86 min.

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© 2009, Fort Worth Star-Telegram.