I’d hoped watching Christina Ricci wearing a prosthetic pig nose for 101 minutes would add at least a grain of amusement to this romantic comedy. I was wrong. Penelope, produced by and co-starring by Reese Witherspoon—her second such mishap, after Legally Blonde 2—is cloying and dull, a sleeping pill dipped in treacle.

Penelope is a young lady from a rich family who, because of an ancient curse, was born with a snout. To lift the curse and get a human nose, she needs to find another rich kid who will love her for who she is. And guess who learns to love her. No, really—guess. Ready? Herself. She learns to love herself. Which tells you pretty much everything you need to know about this film.

But since we must: Penelope interviews a parade of shallow, greedy suitors who are after her dowry. In stumbles the relentlessly debonair Max (James McAvoy), who would be perfect, except he’s not an aristocrat. And he has a gambling problem—a serious, up-all-night, hawk-the-TV gambling problem that he abruptly and painlessly kicks just in time for the denouement.

The problem with Max’s gambling problem is the problem of Penelope—the movie smoothes out all its rough edges, flattens all of its texture, until it looks much like Ms. Witherspoon’s promo shots: pastel, glossy, forgettable. (The sole exception: Peter Dinklage, the four-foot, five-inch actor from The Station Agent, as a gloomy reporter. If Witherspoon and Palansky cast a dwarf just to add fairy-tale whimsy—and I wouldn’t put it past them—their tactic backfired. Dinklage is the only actor up there who seems human.)

Witherspoon and her associate producers allegedly spent $15 million on the project, which they’ll recoup if the imdb reviews are any indication. (“I LOVED THIS MOVIE!!!”) Are people really so excited to see another inferior iteration of the old learn-to-love-yourself story? If so, our national self-esteem is catastrophically low.

PENELOPE DIR. MARK PALANSKY | RATED PG | OPENS FRI

Tags: christina ricci, Film, penelope, reese witherspoon, Reviews