Cinderella meets The Ugly Duckling in Penelope, a muddled, charm-free fairy tale whose title character, played by Christina Ricci, is a rich girl born with the snout of a pig.
The movie's fundamental flaws begin with Penelope's appearance. She is supposed to be so hideous that potential suitors dive out of the windows of her family's London mansion at the first sight of her. After an encounter one greedy twit, Edward Vanderman (Simon Woods), goes to the newspapers with a tale of being attacked by a fanged monster, but nobody believes him.
In actuality Penelope Wilhern, who is hidden away in the house by her snobbish parents, Jessica (Catherine O'Hara) and Franklin (Richard Grant), is more adorable than Miss Piggy. Her nose, through which runs a carotid artery (thus precluding cosmetic surgery), is well-shaped, symmetrical and cutely turned up. Ricci plays her as a smart, hardheaded young woman who stoically accepts her fate. She suffers from an ancient family curse that can be lifted, she is told, only when she marries a man of equivalent social station. There are no takers.
PHOTO: COURTESY OF FOX
The movie takes a wrong turn when Edward, ridiculed for his horror story, teams up with Lemon (Peter Dinklage), a tabloid journalist wearing an eye patch, to prove her existence. They recruit Max (James McAvoy), a down-and-out aristocrat with gambling debts, to court Penelope and photograph her. Max fails to produce a picture, but in their brief encounter a spark is struck.
Penelope, desperate to experience the real world, eventually runs away from home with a scarf wrapped over her nose and is befriended by Annie, a tough-talking bike messenger played by Reese Witherspoon (one of the movie's producers in a thankless cameo performance). Once Penelope's identity is discovered, she becomes a tabloid celebrity.
Directed by Mark Palansky from a screenplay by Leslie Caveny, Penelope is a hopeless jumble of visual and linguistic styles. Its Tim Burton-manque look combines old-fashioned storybook London with a 21st-century cityscape, and the characters speak in a welter of accents (British and American and in between). This is a movie in which even O'Hara, whose twinkling sense of mischief can make almost anything funny, is comically stymied.
Without humor the movie's messages about self-acceptance, snobbery and a paparazzi-infected media register as annoyingly smug.
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