Penelope Wilhern (played by Christina Ricci) is a modern-day Rapunzel, sheltered in a mansion because of a curse placed generations ago that gave the first Wilhern daughter - who turned out to be Penelope - the face of a pig. Penelope's vain and overly protective mother (Catherine O'Hara) has home-schooled her daughter into adulthood and is now working with a matchmaker to find a blueblood who will marry her without fleeing in terror.
But forces are aligning to bring Penelope into the open - not the least of which is Penelope's desire for independence. There's also Edward (Simon Wells), a blueblood heir in danger of losing his inheritance because of his wild stories about a pig-faced girl. Edward meets the one reporter who believes him, Lemon (Peter Dinklage), a tabloid photographer who has tracked Penelope since birth. Lemon and Edward hire a down-and-out blueblood, Max ("Atonement's" James McAvoy), to woo Penelope - and, sure enough, they start to genuinely fall for each other.
There are plenty of agreeably daffy plot turns in Leslie Caveny's screenplay, and several quirky characters (including Reese Witherspoon, one of the film's producers, as a carefree delivery person who befriends Penelope) to add spice to the proceedings. Director Mark Panalsky (a one-time assistant to Michael Bay making his feature debut) balances the movie's messages about personal empowerment and loving someone's inner beauty with the proper degree of whimsy, as its distinctions between Penelope's gilded home life with the candy-colored whirl of the big city land it somewhere between "Babe" and "Pee-wee's Big Adventure."
The casting in "Penelope" is pitch-perfect, from O'Hara and Richard E. Grant as Penelope's parents to Dinklage's laconic (and one-eyed) scandal-monger. But it's Ricci, with her princesslike innocence and Keane-painting eyes, who provides the movie's abundant charm.
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Penelope
* WHERE: Theaters everywhere.
* WHEN: Opens today.
* RATING: PG for thematic elements, some innuendo and language.
* RUNNING TIME: 90 minutes.
* BOTTOM LINE: Christina Ricci plays a modern fairy-tale princess in this offbeat charmer.
