Reviewed
by Lamar Kukuk
3/5/07
It
takes many elements to make a great movie, but just about all of them can
be classified under one of three headings: pure cinema (everything
from the director's shot choices and the special effects to the work of
the makeup artists and the foley editors), acting and plot. How you'd
rank them in order of importance says a lot about the kind of moviegoer
you are. I can really enjoy the crafts of actors and filmmakers of
all kinds, but at the end of the day, it's difficult to be anything but
unhappy with a movie with a BAD story. Mediocre stories can be overcome,
but if I'm sitting in my carefully selected seat in the middle of the back
row of the front section of the theater asking myself who came up with
this nonsense, no amount of effort from the rest of the cast and crew can
make up for it. Case in point: you'd be hard-pressed to find
a better acted comic fantasy than the new (relatively speaking: it
played at the 2006 Toronto Film Festival) Resse Witherspoon-produced fable
Penelope, and the handsomely mounted production is certainly up
to code. But all that could only keep me occupied for so long while
Leslie Caveny's screenplay chugs along on fumes for an hour or so and then
goes into a suicidal nosedive no amount of post-production tinkering can
salvage. Penelope is a hopeless mess, but given how hard a
really good cast tries to make it work, I felt at least as sorry for them
as I did myself for having watched it.
A curse
hangs over the Wilhern family: generations ago, one of their lot
refused to marry the servant girl he loved because she was below his station.
Her mother, “the Town Witch” (those words, obviously, are an early sign
of trouble), cursed the family to know the shame she knew, for their first-born
daughter would have the face of a pig until she finds true love with “one
of her own kind”. It takes a few generations, but finally a daughter
is born to a Wilhern, Franklin (Richard E. Grant) and Jessica (Catherine
O'Hara) to be exact. Give the curse this much, she does kinda have
the face of a pig. OK, she's got the nose and the ears, but that's
still enough to scandalize the media, led by a photographer named Lemon
(Peter Dinklage), who loses an eye in a futile attempt to snap a picture
of the Pig Girl. Jessica fakes her daughter's death and raises her
in seclusion until she reaches adulthood. Then, she hires Matchmaker
to the Rich and Famous Wanda (Ronnie Ancona) to find Penelope (Christina
Ricci) that curse-breaking husband of “her own kind”: stinkin' rich.
Alas, the filthy rich don't take well to their first sight of a girl with
a pig nose, and one who takes it especially badly is Edward Vanderman Jr.
(Simon Woods), who files a sensational police report about a fanged monster
and ends up as a laughing stock. Desperate to restore his good name,
he hooks up with an older, eyepatched Lemon to seek that elusive photo.
To get it, they find a blueblood who's down on his luck: Max (James
McAvoy) goes inside the Wilhern home and begins the slow process of drawing
Penelope out from behind a two-way mirror. During this courtship,
love blossoms, but when his duplicity is exposed, a heartbroken Penelope
wraps her head in a scarf and makes a run for The Outside World.
There, she finds friendship and acceptance. But will her mother's
desperation to end the curse ruin everything?
Yes,
yes it will. Penelope's opening hour is dense with plot (believe
me, I left a LOT out) but light on real conflict. The suitors' disdain
for Penelope's appearance is absurdly overplayed (Ricci is actually quite
pretty in the pig nose, so you'd think somebody would at least ask “What
the Hell?” before jumping out a window) and overacted. Max's heart
never seems to be in his duplicity, and when the outside world gets a look
at the Pig Faced Girl, they love her (as opposed to jumping out windows
to get away from their newspapers). Still, the performances manage
to keep the plates spinning. Ricci has never been better, so sweet,
innocent and painfully naive. Not only does she manage to pull off
the pig nose (the ears are pretty much always hidden behind a big head
of hair), but she makes a scarf that covers 2/3 of her face a great comic
prop. McAvoy is at his most accessible, and he and Ricci have great
chemistry. O'Hara does her thing, and faints hilariously, while Grant
finds gentle, paternal notes I never knew he had (while putting on a great
American accent). But the two best performances come outside the
main plot. Peter Dinklage, always a Palace favorite, is wonderfully
warm as the initially sinister photographer who learns to disdain his tabloid
trade. And Witherspoon radiates pure star power as Annie, the sassy
delivery girl who accepts Penelope for what she is, whether it's a crazy
girl in a big ol' scarf or one with a pig nose.
Alas,
Jessica does finally find someone in the proper tax bracket willing to
walk down the aisle with Penelope, and it's at this moment that the movie
runs off a cliff faster than Thelma and Louise. It's hard enough
to imagine a now-happy Penelope agreeing to a loveless marriage (the movie
is eerily short on arguments: its' characters agree to the most preposterous
things right away for no good reason), but once we get to that altar Caveny
has an alternate solution to the curse up her sleeve which is A) linguistically
clumsy, B) ridiculously timed (since it's based on a feeling, why doesn't
it kick in until a character speaks that feeling aloud? Is the curse
wiretapping the movie?), and C) essentially a curse within a curse that
actually made me feel like Penelope got screwed. The movie knows
it's going down, and the events of the last half hour are compressed like
a crazy fire drill, using narration to spackle over whole scenes we'd probably
just as soon not see anyway. When Penelope and Max finally reunite,
we're reminded that they've actually gone almost an hour without a scene
together, and the whole thing ends up in a silly scene where she asks a
group of children what the moral of the story is. The first suggests
“Rich people are bad,” and another chimes in “It's always the mother's
fault,” before a third provides the “correct” answer. But thinking
back over it, I'm pretty sure the movie's heart is somewhere between answers
1 and 2. Here's the question I couldn't get past: if the movie's
really a parable about self-esteem, why does a happy Penelope need to break
the "curse" of her appearance at all?
Penelope
feels like it should be good: Mark Palansky directs with the appropriate
tone of fairy tale whimsy and his cast is all in. But Caveny's screenplay
is an empowerment tale for the “everybody's special” age: none of
the bad guys are particularly mean, none of the good guys face real hurdles
(anyone in the film saying “Look, could we talk about this?” just once
would surmount almost all their issues), and only those mean rich people
even have a problem accepting a girl with the nose of a pig. In the
face of so little real conflict, it struggles to muster any message other
than a clumsily stated “Don't worry, be happy”. Well, I'm not happy,
because Penelope could really have been something special.
But it all starts on the page, and in that sense, this little piggy was
always a non-starter. |
