Column:
‘Penelope:’ shallow as its characters
Published March 7, 2008
“Penelope” is a tough film to get a read on; it seems to shoot for a tone somewhere between generic family romance and sarcastic fractured fairy tale, a difficult happy medium to reach. Whatever the genre, “Penelope” is a dull movie undercut throughout by its inability to create a story that or characters who make sense — even in the context of a fairy tale.
“Penelope” is about a girl (Christina Ricci) who, because of a family curse, is born with the nose of a pig to really dumb parents. Said parents, perhaps sensing they are in a fairy tale, lock her up in their mansion until she’s ready to be married off, at which point the spell will be broken.
Here — and it is not often that this can be said of a movie that begins with a pig-faced girl — is where it gets ridiculous. Christina Ricci still looks like Christina Ricci, nose aside, yet when she is introduced to her potential suitors they always end up jumping out a second-story window at the sight of her nose.
Now, I’m not going to name foreheads, but the prosthetic nose is not even hands-down the weirdest thing on Penelope’s face. That these people are worried for their own safety on its account is completely absurd.
This is not something that should be an issue in a fairy tale, where suspension of disbelief can be extended to witches’ curses, but screenwriter Leslie Caveny has created such a schizophrenic atmosphere that these forays into the fantastic seem like forced excursions from what degenerates, quickly, into teen movie obstacles — one half expects Penelope to ask her beau if she’s just a bet to him — and, most devastatingly, bad romance novel archetypes.
Indeed, every character falls so readily into a bad romance novel archetype that sans pig nose and PG rating “Penelope” could be a supermarket checkout aisle hit.
Penelope is our sainted heroine, oppressed by forces beyond her control, blameless for her predicament. She escapes and, thanks to a little credit card theft, is able to be independent and free-spirited and any number of other vagaries in exotic Europe.
Naturally she falls for a bad boy, a gambling nobleman named Max, who is completely in love with her from the moment he hears her voice, and more than that, seems to have no life outside of attempting (generally in vain) to please sweet Penelope. When combined with the legion of shallow, window-jumping nobles one is left with a coterie of male characters, judged by the film exclusively on their desire to subjugate their own thoughts for Penelope’s benefit, about as convincing as a sorority novel written by a “Maxim” editor.
So I suppose that trying to figure out what is wrong with “Penelope,” in the end, is not as plain as the nose on her face but as difficult to understand as what it was supposed to be in the first place. Penelope the character was locked up in her room for 20 years; “Penelope” the movie was locked up on the shelf for two. Presumably it was not long enough.
