‘The Penguin Lessons’ Review: Steve Coogan Finds His Happy Feet in a Gentle True-Life Tale
Argentina’s 1976 military coup d’état, along with the sustained period of violence and forced disappearances that it ushered in, isn’t an obvious historical backdrop for a heartwarming tale of human-animal bonding. But that’s how the timing worked out for Tom Michell, an English teacher stationed at an elite Buenos Aires private school, at the time of the turmoil: With the country in chaos and many of his colleagues in crisis, he was figuring out what to do with the Magellan penguin he had accidentally adopted on a weekend jaunt to Uruguay. His 2016 memoir of that period, “The Penguin Lessons,” was the kind of breezy read that bridges adult and juvenile tastes for animal stories; Peter Cattaneo’s amiable film adaptation matches the book’s feathery whimsy while reaching for a little more political import. Almost inevitably, it’s best when it’s about the bird.
While Michell was in his twenties at the time of the events described in his book, this adaptation by screenwriter Jeff Pope (“Philomena”) has been retooled as a vehicle for Pope’s regular collaborator, 58-year-old Steve Coogan — with some somber backstory added to explain why an Englishman of that approximate age might still be spending his days adrift in South America. It’s a change that shifts the tenor of the entire narrative in a more melancholic direction, though it remains easy viewing, now tilted a little more toward the gray-pound audience. Coogan spikes proceedings with his familiar air of deadpan irony, while Cattaneo (in one of his better outings since landing an Oscar nomination for “The Full Monty” nearly 27 years ago) mixes broad comic beats with a mollifying dose of yellow-filtered pathos.
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Still, you can sense the curious tonal split from the jump, as Coogan’s Michell — clad in the mandatory Seventies teacher uniform of corduroy blazer, slacks and suede desert boots, all in varying shades of gravy — arrives with a bemused frown at the forbiddingly exclusive gates of his new place of employment, to find workmen painting over “fascistas bastardos” graffiti on the high outside wall. There’s a muffled thunder of gunfire and explosives in the distance; Michell is mostly irked to get a spot of paint on his shoe. “We try to keep out of it all,” says stuffy headmaster Buckle (Jonathan Pryce) as he welcomes the new teacher, stressing the importance of “a small ‘p’ when it comes to politics.” His blinkered centrism is held up for mockery, though “The Penguin Lessons” isn’t about to get terribly revolutionary itself.
Mild comedy ensues as Michell settles in: struggling to connect with the unruly boys in his class, doing reluctant double duty as a hopeless rugby coach and forming a prickly bond with his earnest, sarcasm-averse Finnish colleague Michel (Bj?rn Gustafsson). Any political context is filled in via the school’s gruff but gold-hearted caretaker Maria (Vivian El Jaber) and her granddaughter Sofia (Alfonsina Carrocio), who are rather more directly affected than these European outsiders by the tumult of Argentina’s Dirty War. When the coup occurs, it’s backgrounded, treated by Michell merely as a prompt for a brief, hedonistic escape to Uruguay, where, in an attempt to impress a one-night stand, he rescues a penguin from an oil slick on the beach.
His intention is simply to clean the bird — soon rather grandly named Juan Salvador — and return it to its natural habitat. Juan Salvador, however, refuses to leave his crotchety savior’s side, earning himself a passage back to Argentina in a canvas tote bag. Cue droll hijinks as Michell attempts to hide his unusual new pet from border guards and then from school authorities, though Juan Salvador is simply too adorable to stay hidden for too long. Soon enough, he’s sitting in on classes, somehow instigating a “Dead Poets Society”-style turnaround as Michell, newly invested, veers from the syllabus to include anti-war poetry, and his pupils are suddenly spellbound. Such is the power of the penguin, and to be fair, Juan Salvador is played by such charismatic avian talent that we’re just about willing to believe it.
This is amusing stuff, well served by Coogan’s knack for haughty composure in the face of the absurd. The film is less convincing, however, when it reaches into the realm of the tragic. Sofia’s kidnapping by the military junta is too severe an incident to be relegated to a B-plot behind more feelgood seabird material, while Coogan can’t quite sell his character’s deeper reserves of grief. Michell’s eventual contravention of the school code to intervene in political matters should be more climactic, but given how the film shies from showing the coup’s more violent consequences, the stakes don’t feel as high as they should. If you can keep the out-of-sight devastation duly out of mind, and focus instead on the wonder of Juan Salvador, “The Penguin Lessons” will hold you in its grasp — although, true to the humble charms of its flightless MVP, it never quite aims to soar.
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