Review: The Penguin Lessons — Movies for the Rest of Us with Bill Newcott

The Penguin Lessons

⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️

Rating: PG-13

Run Time: 1 hour 50 minutes

Stars: Steve Coogan, Jonathan Pryce, Alfonsina Carrocio

Writers: Jeff Pope, Tom Michell

Director: Peter Cattaneo

Reviewed at the Toronto International Film Festival

 

Steve Coogan brings on the warm and fuzzies in this sweet-hearted story about an embittered British teacher who tries to escape his personal misery by signing up at a private Argentine boarding school — only to find himself the reluctant foster parent of a flapping, squawking Magellanic penguin.

His timing isn’t the best, though, because at this particular time, 1976, Argentina is in the throes of a military coup, with tens of thousands of citizens being “disappeared.”

That narrative journey — involving frequent shifts between the twee and the tragic —  sometimes makes for a bumpy ride. But The Penguin Lessons has the always-reliable Coogan at the wheel and an adorable penguin navigating, and that’s enough.

Coogan plays Tom Michell, a burned-out 50-something teacher whose morose reasons for leaving England eventually explain his dour demeanor. We meet him as he stands at the gates to the exclusive school, watching with bemused detachment as a worker paints over a rebellious slogan painted on the stone wall, then looking down in disgust as he realizes he’s totally ruining his suede boots in a puddle of yellow paint.

Presently Tom meets his boss (Jonathan Pryce), a prickly administrator who desires, at all costs, to keep the revolution outside the school’s walls and away from the male students — all of them presumably the children of wealthy Argentinians.

That’s easier said than done, as muffled gunshots drift over the walls and the school’s maintenance and cleaning staff, all locals, arrive daily with reports of new atrocities outside.

As Tom’s first semester at the school counts down — none too soon, as neither he nor his students seem even remotely inspired to learn anything — he heads off to Paraguay for a weekend vacation with a co-worker (Björn Gustafsson) where Tom 1) meets up with a lovely woman with whom he’d like to spend the night and 2) discovers, during a romantic beach stroll, a nearly dead penguin coated with oil from an offshore spill.

Since this is the movies, 1) the woman says goodnight and leaves and 2) Tom brings the penguin back to his hotel room, where he dutifully cleans off the oil, saving the penguin’s life.

Next morning, Tom tries to shoo the penguin back into the sea, but the bird is having none of it: He keeps clomping back ashore and nuzzling Tom, his savior.

The ensuing scenes of Tom trying to smuggle the penguin back across the border, sneak him into his apartment on the school grounds, and find ways to keep him quiet during the day are funny and appropriately madcap. This is Coogan at his best: The poker-faced, uptight Brit struggling to soldier through the most outrageous and sometimes humiliating situations with a dignified stiff upper lip.

Of course, Tom can keep his penguin pal — now named Juan Salvador — under wraps for only so long. Soon the bird is not only slapping his webbed feet all over campus, he also becomes a fixture in Tom’s classroom. Naturally — thanks to a series of heart-swelling classroom scenes that conjure up images of Dead Poets Society if Robin Williams had been wearing a tuxedo — the bird’s presence inspires one and all to knuckle down and become more conscientious. Even the stuck-up old headmaster eventually comes around.

Still, there’s that pesky revolution going on, and inevitably its shadow engulfs the school: A   housekeeper’s granddaughter, Sofia (Alfonsina Carrocio), gets swept up in a government street raid and disappears. Until this point in his life, Tom has seemingly never cared that much about helping anybody do anything. But now — somewhat unconvincingly inspired by his penguin parenting gig — he recklessly sticks his neck out to find her.

The ugliness of the war and the grotesque peril facing Sofia consume this portion of the film, almost to the point where we’re saying to ourselves, “Wait, wasn’t this a comedy about a man and his penguin?” It’s an imbalance not quite resolved by director Peter Cattaneo (The Full Monty, The Lost King) and his frequent co-writer Jeff Pope, who try valiantly to retain the integrity of both storylines.

Still, we came here for the penguin, and we miss him when he’s not waddling around.

I almost skipped The Penguin Lessons at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival, thinking I had already seen it, conflating it with the previous month’s The Penguin Teacher, a similarly sentimental story about another Magellanic penguin, also covered with oil, found dying on another South American beach by another man (Jean Reno) who’d also been embittered by a tragedy not unlike the one endured by Tom in The Penguin Lessons. Since both movies are based on true stories, one might suspect there may be a secret army of penguins out there, lolling in oil spills, waiting to bring meaning and fulfillment to troubled humans. Call them Magic Penguins.

Likewise, that earlier film struggled to reconcile the whimsy of its black-and-white costar with the personal tragedy endured by the human protagonist. Still, for both movies I laughed at all the right moments and held back a tear whenever appropriate.

Which may say more about my wildlife preferences than my taste in movies.