Penelope

When I was in college, I took a class on fairy tales. I always knew they had their dark side—you know, witches who ate little children and stuff like that—but I was still amazed at how downright disturbing most of them were. Now, they’re pretty tame; Disney made certain of that, so instead of being turned into seafoam, the Little Mermaid gets to be lovey-lovey with her handsome prince. Still, mushy or macabre, I’m a sucker for a good fairy tale, and Penelope came as a pleasant surprise.

    A modern-day fairy tale, Penelope’s title character (Christina Ricci) is a smart, charming aristocrat heiress who was born with a curse. She has the nose and ears of a pig, and only “one of their own kind” would have the power to break the curse. In order to protect their daughter—and to save face (no pun intended) for the family — Penelope’s parents, the Wilherns (Catherine O’Hara and Richard E. Grant), fake their daughter’s death and keep her confined to their spacious estate. Employing a matchmaker, the Wilherns fervently search for a suitor who will see past Penelope’s looks and break the curse; however, upon meeting the young woman, they usually run away screaming.

    Meanwhile, a nosy reporter, Lemon (Peter Dinklage), has teamed up with one of Penelope’s more promising beaus (played by Simon Woods), to expose the Wilhern family secret. To do so, they use Max (James McAvoy), an aristocrat-turned-degenerate gambler, as a sort of Trojan horse to infiltrate the Wilhern estate and get close enough to Penelope to snap a picture. Of course, Max and Penelope end up hitting it off, and their relationship leads the title character on a road to self-discovery.



    Penelope is a fairy tale through and through, but other than the title character’s fantastic appearance, it’s more concerned with the everyday sort of magic than witches and spells. Though the film is peppered with the kind of clichés you’d expect from a story like this, its storytelling is rather sublime and witty enough to take what the audience might expect and toy with it just enough to make this tale engaging as well as familiar. The filmmakers also displayed a good eye for detail when it came to set dressing, costuming and Penelope’s makeup effects. The pig snout and ears suit Ricci’s face remarkably well (and I mean that in a good way), and her signature outfit—a multi-colored scarf she uses to hide her grotesque features and a purple coat with mismatched buttons—completes a character that doesn’t fit in with the world at large.

    The film also benefits from some fun performances. Veteran actor Peter Dinklage is hilarious as Lemon and has some of the film’s best lines; O’Hara is sharp as usual as Penelope’s excessively doting mother; and Simon Woods is as comedic as he is despicable as a gunshy, spoiled rotten silver-spooner. Ricci and McAvoy also create an attractive onscreen couple—pig features not withstanding. The duo seems to have taken their witty, overly romantic repartee to heart, but Ricci and McAvoy are also strong when things are left unsaid. In the scene where their two characters meet face-to-face for the first time, the actors keenly create the difficult emotions caused by the event with a series of expressions instead of words.

    Most of all, Penelope is very entertaining. Funny, sweet and romantic, this is the kind of movie you want to get under the covers and cuddle with for a while. It’s creepy, but it’s true. The characters are just so darn lovable that the “happily ever after” feels really rewarding. I left Penelope with a crippling case of the warm-fuzzies. My normally dismal outlook on life was replaced by something nauseatingly rosy. The only cure was copious amounts of gloomy metal and swigs off my bedside bottle of whiskey. I got better—eventually.

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