DVD Review Penelope *** (out of 5)

In the infamous Kafkaesque Twilight Zone episode, ‘Eye of the Beholder’ a shadowy group of surgeons and hospital staff huddle around the patient, Janet Tyler, who has just emerged from surgery and whose face is wrapped in bandages.

As these are slowly removed a beautiful woman is revealed amid gasps of horror from the medical staff who are all revealed to have pig noses and disfigured features.

In Penelope, a family curse deals the eponymous character (Christina Ricci) a bad hand, born with the snout of a pig,  an inoperable predicament due to proximity to the carotid artery (a clever gambit by the writers, who know that their plot would not withstand an arms folded, ‘well why doesn’t she just get a nose-job?’ audience).

In this ‘modern romantic fairy tale’, her blue blood parents up the dowry ante to find a betrothed for their daughter, a ‘face that launched a thousand quips’ (and at least a dozen pig-related gags in the opening set up) who hurl themselves out the nearest window upon first encounter, a far cry from her namesake, Odysseus’ wife, besieged by suitors she had to repeatedly fend off.

After dozens of eligible bachelors in smart blazers cannot stomach her visage, Penelope finally finds kinship with one of them.  Sadly, he is a professional gambler with a hidden camera, paid off by a tabloid to snap a picture and help fix the reputation of another suitor, whose reputation had been besmirched when his reporting to police of ‘a woman with a pig face’ landed him in those same tabloids.

Upset at being set up, she eventually ventures out into the big wide world, runs away from home, a scarf concealing her face, meets the effervescent and adventurous ‘Annie’ (Reese Witherspoon) and begins to find the life her worried parents had shielded her from, in this, a narrative that those who’ve had to hide their identity due to self-esteem issues, religion or sexuality will likely find all too familiar.

When her hidden face is finally revealed (her shamed parents were unwilling to offer up an accurate description to police they’d hired to track her down) Penelope is widely accepted but also exploited as a biological oddity (”You’re only a talking pig to those people”, says her mother (Catherine O’Hara) in the same way the Dionne Quintuplets (the first to survive infancy) captured the world’s attention during the Great Depression.

A bold, vital message is sullied by an uneven script that is held together by charming performances, particularly the subtle Ricci and energized Witherspoon, playing against type.

Unfortunately, it also leads to the inevitable “I like myself just the way I am” crowd pleaser culmination, a message that the denouement can’t help but contradict.