Penelope

Rating: ***

The key problem with the film Penelope is that it assumes that Christina Ricci can be hideous even if she’s wearing a prosthetic pig nose. I know that fantasy films require a certain degree of suspension of disbelief, but seriously, I just can’t buy it. At times, Penelope can be funny, whimsical and just a little bit off kilter. But at other times it feels like its trying too hard; like it’s trying to out quirky the competition. Realistically, the film should have worked better than just okay, but it finds enough oddity in its star power to achieve some success as a modern fairy tale.

Penelope is the sum of a curse placed on a wealthy family that deemed the first daughter born of the Wilhern family will have the looks of a pig in retaliation for the mistreatment of servant girl years before. Penelope’s mother (Catherine O’Hara) is utterly cautious about letting anyone have a look at her daughter, even the blue blooded suitors she’s recruiting to marry Penelope and lift the curse. Naturally though, when the men see her face-to-face they run the other way, until one day a single man named Max (James McAvoy) looks to be a promising possibility and inspires Penelope to come out of her shell.

Part fish-out-of-water story and part Cinderella tale with a twist, Penelope plays like the filmed love child of Tim Burton and Wes Anderson. The sets are immaculately designed, especially Penelope’s bedroom, which is filled with relics of a childhood lived inside away from the eyes of everyone except those that live in the house. The film is shot with mellow tones highlighted by rich colours that boldly standout on screen from the rest of the action. And let’s not forget the quirky characters: Richard E. Grant’s put upon dad, Simon Woods over-reacting Edward and Peter Dicklage as an eye-patched journalist out to get Penelope’s mom back for taking his eye years earlier.

Unfortunately, while the movie occupies itself with looking cool and acting cool, a lot of it seemed forced to me. A lot of the plot felt standard, not unoriginal per se but definitely uninspired. You can practically guess in advance that when Penelope goes public, she becomes a media darling, just as you know that Max is going to be her true love in the end, no matter how many hurtles are thrown up between the girl with the pig nose and the man with a gambling problem. It’s too bad then that while Ricci exudes easy naivety and charm, McAvoy seems so entirely disengaged from the material it makes you wonder why he took this gig.

Naturally, there’s a twist near the end that caught me by surprise in the way of how utterly anti-climactic it was. If this is a fairy tale, where’s the moral lesson? Where’s the comeuppance for the haters? And why are Edward’s parents forcing a marriage between him and Penelope? Some stuff goes unexplained and some stuff just goes. But it all comes down to the fact that Christina Ricci isn’t ugly – even in a pig nose, which the make-up designers seemed to go to great lengths to delude the aesthetic impact of.

Bottom line is she makes it work, and I suppose in the interest of benefit of the doubt I can go along with supposing she’s ugly. But seriously, I’ve seen Maury Povich’s show. I know what else is out there. A pig nose is the least of your concerns, especially when the rest of her looks and sounds like Christina Ricci. Penelope had method and opportunity, but unfortunately no motive.