Penelope

Penelope is the name of Odysseyus’ wife, who waits with unflagging faithfulness for him to return from his long journey. The implication of the heroine here having the same name is that she’s a diamond in the rough, a domestic treasure waiting to be found. She’s a princess who is the reward for her own rescue; having her means having everything a man could want in a wife. To have all this, he must only persevere through a long and arduous journey, i.e. get over the fact that she looks like a pig.

On his way home, Odysseus encounters the nymph Circe, who turns most of his men into pigs. Odysseus himself is immune, and for this, Circe falls in love with him and rewards him with herself. So, the trailer indicates, he who remains immune to Penelope’s pig-ness (read: his own pigishness in caring about her pig-ness), will be rewarded with the woman who is both the source of the pig problem and the reward for getting past it. This combination of Penelope and Circe is not a stretch. Circe further rewards Odysseus for his integrity by helping him return to Penelope, and years later she implicitly endorses their marriage when she marries their son Telemachus, who has waited with his mother for his father’s return.

The casting of Christina Ricci is significant; since the audience knows that the ostensibly ugly girl is actually Christina Ricci, it’s understood that she’s beautiful "on the inside," the fact that men are disgusted by her is easily understood to mean that those men are simply wrong ("they don’t realize it’s Christina Ricci" = "they don’t realize that she’s actually beautiful" = "they don’t see her inner beauty"). Ricci’s quirky appeal is also useful here.   

Another implicit reference here is the Twilight Zone episode, " The Eye of the Beholder," in which a young woman with a beautiful human face is deemed ugly by an alternate world full of pig-faced people. And no movie buff is going to watch this trailer without thinking of Mask, a much more serious treatment of the ugly-is-beautiful story (and based on actual events), starring Eric Stoltz.

Penelope Trailer