Penelope

The Wilhern family is haunted for generations by a curse after angering a witch: the next daughter born into the family will be blighted by a having a pigs nose, until they find a rich person who loves them for who they are. Introducing Penelope (Christina Ricci), the Wilhern family secret, an otherwise beautiful young lady with a nose that will make men jump out of windows (a quickly exhausted gag), and her quest to find a loving man. She lives an isolated life until a vindictive suitor, Edward Vandermann III (Simon Woods), threatens to blow her cover. With the help of reporter Lemon (Peter Dinklage), Edward sends compulsive gambler Max (James McAvoy) in to get photos Penelope but, alas, Max falls for her.

Christina Ricci is a charming choice for the lead and her unconventional beauty fits the role of Penelope well; Catherine O’Hara also suits the part as the shallow matriarch of the Wilhern family, and Peter Dinklage and James McAvoy both amuse intermittently. Unfortunately Richard E Grant’s patriarch and a miscast Reese Witherspoon, as a delivery girl, are both on auto-pilot, while Simon Woods’ spoilt Edward is simply horrible and not in a villainous sense.

The problems with Penelope go beyond some bad acting. After a hurried and expositional opening, the film never really settles into a steady pace and Penelope at points feels over-edited. For a fairytale Penelope lacks the sense of the fantastical, with a bit too much time being devoted to light satire of tabloid celebrity culture and modern courtship, instead of developing the necessary magic. Worse still is the plotting of a mistaken identity twist, which offers no real benefit to the story and is handled extremely clumsily.

At times there are some nice design touches and visual flourishes, such as Lemon’s retro-style surveillance van and Penelope’s beautiful bedroom. Penelope, on the whole, lacks a tangible feel of location, and though that in itself isn’t a problem and the setting isn’t ever stated, the director Mark Palansky seems to want to create a London-esque place complete with grimy East End dives and a traditional English pub. But when it comes to the details - a police station which couldn’t look more unrealistic if it was drawn on with crayons, the 50:50 divide between English and American actors, and a city skyline that looks closer to New York than London - the film falls short.

Penelope might please its younger target audience and genre fans, but after being force-fed it’s moral of believing in inner beauty (the film ends with children being questioned about the moral of the story) I was feeling less than enchanted. The saddest thing about Penelope is that it feels like a missed opportunity. With a plotline that falls somewhere Beauty And The Beast and Edward Scissorhands, Penelope had the potential to be a charming modern fairytale for the whole family but instead the filmmakers end up making a pig’s ear of it.