 Competing for the young female audience is Penelope, starring Christina Ricci, about a rich girl whose nose looks like a pig's snout and is therefore shunned by those around her. On the surface, it may sound like a neat fairy-tale of a film, but Gene Seymour in Newsday writes that "there's no real rigor or craft applied to this story; just mood, tone, neo-Gothic imagery and frantic attitude." It's the film, not the character, that seems cursed, several critics suggest. Susan Walker in the Toronto Star notes that it has been two years since it originally debuted at the Toronto Film Festival and has sat on a shelf ever since. She adds: "Maybe there was more to that family curse than the filmmakers reckoned on, because now that it's finally released, Penelope seems destined for early oblivion." And many critics suggest that the main problem with the film is that even with a pig's snout, Christina Ricci doesn't look ugly at all. In fact, most of the critics remark, she looks awfully cute. |
