Penelope

Piggishly Perfect

It’s hard to be an eleven-year-old girl. It’s hard to parent an eleven-year-old girl. But harder still is finding a movie appropriate for an eleven-year old girl. Hollywood seems hell bent on churning out “romantic comedies” for little girls – targeting tweens with material that is completely inappropriate for their level of development. There are those rare “family movies” that we all enjoy, but when it comes to demographic specific films for girls between the ages of nine and twelve, most of them seem to consist of hooker training videos starring whichever Disney TV star has been chosen to wear tiny pieces of clothing and strut around like a college student for two hours while teaching little girls the great value of having expensive clothes and electronics and “hooking up” with the cutest boy in school. Gah! Mininocket is eleven years old! The truth is, she doesn’t want to watch this hyper-sexualized crap – it makes her uncomfortable. She’s too old for Winnie the Pooh. Thank goodness that once in a while along comes a film like Penelope.

Penelope is a fairy tale. Set in some sort of odd hybrid of the US and Britain at some sort of odd hybrid between the present and several eras of the past, Penelope is about a girl who looks like a pig. That’s right, a pig. Many generations past, a curse was placed on the family of the father of Penelope (Christina Ricci) in which the next female child to be born would bear the countenance of a pig until she was truly loved and accepted by one of her own. Only then would the curse be broken and the girl restored to human visage. “One of her own” meant a blue blood, nobility, you know – rich people. By chance of fate it took many, many generations for the curse to be born out and poor Penelope is the unfortunate recipient of the snout.

Now Penelope has two loving parents (Catherine O’Hara and Richard E. Grant) who, after gazing upon her (really rather cute) pig snout do what any loving parents would do. They fake her death and sequester her in her home throughout her childhood – never allowing her to be seen or heard. She has everything she could want in the house, think her parents, and is protected from the cruelties of the outside world. As she becomes a young woman, her parents are determined to find just the right young man who will love her and break the curse. They have to be carefully selected (to be of proper stature) and then are allowed to get to know the girl a bit before being allowed to see her. Many a young man has run screaming from young Penelope, only to be caught and legally silenced about the experience so as to continue to protect Penelope from the prying eyes of the outside world. There is only one goal in Penelope’s life – find a husband and break that curse so she can have a “normal” nose.

The film follows this search for the perfect young man. We come to know Penelope and understand the damage done, not by her nose, but by the notion that she is hideous. She has grown into a young woman certain that only a change in her appearance could ever lead to a happy life. Of course, that’s the point of the entire movie – everyone is focused on Penelope’s nose. Even a reporter from the time of her birth continues his quest for a picture of the pig-girl. Penelope comes to expect rejection, isolation and disappointment. She isn’t normal, she will never be normal. Yet, what happens when she meets a young man who might be different? How will she react? How will he react? What might happen if Penelope were to venture out into that cruel, cold world?

We get to watch every delightful moment of Penelope’s journey. We meet her as the hopeful but realistic shut-in and follow her as she discovers that the world really isn’t how she imagined at all. Better in some ways, worse in others, but definitely not at all what she (or we) expected. Christina Ricci is lovely as the be-snouted Penelope. In fact, she’s absolutely adorable, making clear the shallowness of those many blue-blooded boys who run from her in horror. She’s also thoughtful and smart and funny……and sad and lonely. Ricci does such a wonderful job with this character – Penelope is a young woman with the experiences of a much younger girl. She is, in so many ways, just like a young adolescent – filled with self doubt, insecure about her place in the world, terrified that people won’t accept her. That her cross to bear is a pig snout in no way diminishes how perfectly she mirrors a child whose cross is a first pimple.

Penelope’s world is rich and colorful, adding to the fairy tale style hyper-saturated set design. Her house is fantastically elaborate (her parents are rich, of course) and her clothing is beautifully shaped and colored, her royal purple coat being a favorite of both myself and mininocket. It’s both old fashioned and beautiful and just simply perfect for Penelope. We also love her room, with its giant swing and massive play area.

Peripheral characters all suit their roles well. James McAvoy as the suitor who is not quite what he seems is cute and sweet. He has a touch of sadness and desperation to his character that makes him feel more grown up than Penelope, but not so much that he becomes unrelatable. Catherine O’Hara is funny and more than a little maddening as Penelope’s mother. But she, too, is filling a role – that of the person too involved to the situation to see it clearly. She cares, but she cares too much about the wrong things – her focus is muddled. Reese Witherspoon shows up as a tough chick who can handle herself in the city, showing Penelope what she has been missing all these years. It is through her character that Penelope begins to realize how diverse the world is and how everyone can fit in somewhere.

Penelope has a clear, easy moral – love yourself as you are. In a world where body image can become a disease, this is a valuable lesson indeed for the tween set. They are inundated every day by a culture that looks at them not for who they are, but for what they have and how they look. Using a fairy tale style that many tween girls (and definitely mine) absolutely adore, the film has a simple lesson, well told without being either stupid or too grown-up for kids to get the point. It isn’t heavy handed, it simply never tries to hide its agenda. Though Penelope is far older than the target audience for the film (and is looking for potential husbands), the entire production is fairy-tale chaste. A single kiss comprises 100% of the sexual situations and there is almost no violence (what there is consisting of suitors throwing themselves out of windows in horror at the sight of Penelope – their injuries serve them right). Penelope is a sweet girl with occasional mood swings as she goes from optimistic to angry to sad and withdrawn. We here at Chez Nocket could relate to all of those and we’ve barely begun our ride on the female adolescent roller coaster. Mininocket and I watched Penelope together and both thoroughly enjoyed the characters, the story and the glorious set design and talked afterward about how important it is to accept ourselves and others as we are, not as anyone else tells us we should be. Disney can keep its creepy, hyper-sexual early teens and have them gyrate to their hearts content – someone out there is still making movies for girls that address the issues they need to talk and hear about in a way that makes them comfortable and helps them feel secure as they enter a singularly insecure time in their lives. Thanks, Penelope, we need more of you.