Finally, Mother devises a plan to have blue-blooded suitors sign a nondisclosure agreement for the chance to meet and fall in love with Penelope. But, as soon as she shows her face, the young guys run screaming from the house, even jumping through the window to get away. One of those potential suitors, Edward Vanderman (Woods), goes to the police and the tabloids telling the outlandish story. No one believes him, except a disgruntled reporter named Lemon (Dinklage), who has had his share of run-ins with the Wilherns.

Lemon hires a down-on-his-luck young aristocrat named Max (McAvoy) to woo Penelope and help pay down his gambling debts. What Max doesn't expect is that he will eventually fall in love with the person behind the hideous face. But when she finds out that Max was really paid to be there in the first place, Penelope storms out of the house and into the cruel, real world, where she befriends a crazy, carefree girl named Annie (Witherspoon).

With her parents desperately looking for her, and Max heartsick at the way he treated her, Penelope ends up facing some realities of her own while trying to make it without them.

Loses by a nose

Perhaps this movie would be more, uh, credible (?) if Ricci didn't look so cute with that nose on—maybe if she resembled the pig-faced nurses in that horrific Twilight Zone episode? The potential suitors look as if they're horrified, when in reality many of us have dated people with scarier faces, and there's a lot more to appreciate about Ricci anyway.

O'Hara, who's fantastic as the frantic mom in Home Alone, way overdoes it here as the outwardly caring but intensely cruel mother who also can't seem to look beyond the nose.

Witherspoon is in a small supporting role that doesn't come in for a long time, and her character is a bit off-putting at first. The Oscar-winning actress took a back seat in this film because she's one of the producers for Type A Films and this is their first independent production.

The story is completely predictable. There's hardly a moment where the next scene couldn't be figured out, and the characters are all so over-the-top that Penelope is the most normal person in the bunch. Director Mark Palansky previously directed the short fairy-tale-like film The Same, starring Josh Hartnett, and that led Universal Studios exces to this project, but it's not clear what vision he might have had for the film.