An unusual romantic fantasy flick, Penelope, has sat on the shelf for a year-and-a-half since it debuted at the 2006 Toronto Film Festival. The longer a movie builds dust between its festival debut and its national release can almost always portend a direct ratio to the quality of the film. Juno was the little Toronto movie that built an ever-increasing avalanche of buzz all the way to an Oscar for best original screenplay. Penelope had its premiere a full year before Juno, and five minutes in, you can tell why it's been sitting on a shelf while the "cautionary whale" became the little movie that could. Perhaps the best way to describe Penelope is "the little movie that no one could figure out". Part-fable, part-comedy, and part-awkward story, Penelope serves as proof that what Jean-Pierre Jeunet does with films like Amelie and The City of Lost Children or what’s currently being accomplished on ABC’s Pushing Daisies is, in fact, very, very difficult to pull off. It's a tightrope of styles that writer Leslie Caveny and director Mark Palansky simply have a tough time walking, and the whole thing comes tumbling down like a fairy tale with an unhappy ending.

Penelope is kind of like a messed-up dream you might have after watching Amelie and that great Twilight Zone episode "The Eye of the Beholder" (the one where a woman wakes from surgery, considers herself horribly scarred even though she looks normal, and we discover that all the doctors and nurses looked vaguely like Wilbur from Green Acres). Christina Ricci plays the title character, a woman cursed with the nose of a pig (it's often implied that it's the "face of a pig" but it's really just a pig snout). Penelope's parents were cursed by a witch years ago, a hag who decried that the family’s first daughter would have a pig nose until she found someone who could love her through her deformity. Her parents - a frustrating Catherine O'Hara and a wasted Richard E. Grant - bring in countless suitors with promises of dowries a-plenty, but they all run for the hills when they see the "Babe" they've been set up to court.

For years, a reporter (Peter Dinklage) has been trying to get a photo of the famous pig-girl, and he teams with one of the suitors, now deemed ridiculous by his tales of a true Petunia Pig, to get to the bottom of this mystery. They find a down-on-his-luck blue blood, played with charm by James McAvoy, and convince him to get past the awkward first impressions of poor Penelope. Will Penelope find true love? Will she come to terms with her own imperfections and love herself? Is that really Reese Witherspoon making a cameo as a biker chick? (Strangely, the answer is "yes".)

As you might imagine, Penelope is one of the weirdest movies of the last few years but that doesn’t have to be derogatory - "weird" can turn magical in the right hands. Unfortunately, Penelope never finds the right hands. Palansky bogs the fantasy down with so many cliches about loving oneself and never gives us a character truly interesting enough to care about. The movie’s combination of accents and skylines are reminiscent of Babe: Pig in the City - filmmakers love pigs apparently - in their mix of reality and fantasy but that pork-inspired film stayed committed to its tone. Penelope can't decide if it’s a fable or just a variation on the "Ugly Betty" concept that’s been around as long as the romantic comedy. Another major flaw is that Ricci is still too cute even with a pig nose. That might sound shallow, but it's indicative of the overall problem with the film - it never goes all the way. Perhaps if Penelope truly did look like a pig, the fairy tale about her finding love and self-confidence might have more resonance. As it is, Penelope is just another stab at modern fantasy with some fatal filmmaking flaws that are all-too-real.