Penelope

Set the scene: I’m 14 years old, and a few months into my freshman year of high school. I am fucking miserable. I feel like a loser all the time. I listen to Declan McKenna’s debut album on the bus every morning and every single morning I cry. I have a crush on a boy who is unreachable not because of who I am but because of how I saw myself. I was at peak insecurity. I had never hated myself so much. I didn’t see a future for me, in having many friends, in ever falling in love, definitely not having a good time in high school. I felt so isolated all the time. A fateful Day in October, I go home and decide I want to watch a movie on Netflix. At this time in my life, I rarely watched movies, and they were pretty much always romance films. Penelope called to me in this very odd way, so nostalgic it made me uncomfortable. I was pretty sure I’d seen it as a younger kid, but I couldn’t remember almost anything. I didn’t really want to watch it, and usually I wouldn’t have, but I had reached a point of desperation and needed to feel something. Maybe a movie from my early childhood would help me to be in a better mood. I know this is not an objectively amazing film, it did not and never will get accolades, it has the dialogue and plot complexity of a straight-to-DVD movie, I know that. But it’s just so insanely warm. I would give five years of my life to live in the Penelope universe. Her green house, her desert-view windows, the types of decorations that were sold in Bealls Outlet when I was six, the newspaper office that is just so of the time period, Johnny’s apartment, the adorable Irish bar, the hotel…every single set has this type of whimsy that makes my stomach turn. I can’t really explain it. But six years ago, when I watched this for what I’m pretty sure now was the first time, it got me good. James McAvoy and Christina Ricci are so compelling for the time they get together. You just know a more serious film with them as the leads would be an all-time hit. I had already been sucked in by them, and was ready to call this a great movie experience. But then, I was hit with what might be the greatest needle drop ever (?): just as Johnny realizes Penelope is under the mask, we hear the opening notes of Sigur Ros’s Hoppípolla. I did not know the song and I only know it now because of this movie, but I cannot explain to you accurately how romantic and beautiful this song is, how effectively it conveys a feeling of longing and unity, how it sounds exactly like an ending so happy you could just die. Combined with the Penelope sets, it fucking gets me. I have never watched this movie without crying at the end. So yeah I am a generous rater on here, I know that, but the memory of fourteen-year-old me sobbing so hard after watching this that my sister came to check on me is enough to justify literally all of the praise that I give it.