In the movies, bonding with a cute, helpless animal is a surefire cure for cynicism, and that's exactly what happens to world-weary English teacher Tom Michell (Steve Coogan) after he rescues a penguin from an oil slick on a beach in Uruguay in The Penguin Lessons. By the time he takes a job at an exclusive boarding school in Argentina, Tom has clearly already lost his way, but that chance encounter with a fussy sea bird will change his outlook forever.
As a story about a curmudgeon regaining his passion for living by befriending a wild animal, The Penguin Lessons is treacly but inoffensive, with a blandly likable lead performance from Coogan. As a historical drama set in 1976 Buenos Aires, though, it's a clumsy misfire, offering simplistic observations about a turbulent period in Argentina's history, all from the perspective of a privileged white Englishman.
Tom arrives at St. George's College just as Argentina is on the cusp of a military coup, but he's not particularly concerned with the threats to human rights or the crackdown on dissidents. When the coup succeeds and the school shuts down for a week to let things calm down, Tom is mainly excited to have time off to travel to Uruguay so he can relax on the beach and meet women.
Instead, he meets the penguin he eventually dubs Juan Salvador. Via a series of mildly amusing mishaps, he finds himself stuck taking the animal back to Buenos Aires with him. Nearly half the movie has gone by before Tom brings Juan Salvador to class, where the penguin charms his unruly students and serves as the catalyst for a half-hearted Dead Poets Society riff.
Tom isn't much of an inspirational teacher, and his students barely get any lines, let alone distinctive personalities or character arcs. The school's stuffy headmaster, Buckle (Jonathan Pryce), poses a minimal threat to Tom's career or to the continued presence of Juan Salvador at St. George's, and there's no big academic assessment for the film to build toward.
The urgency in the screenplay by Jeff Pope comes instead from the increasing threat of the military dictatorship, particularly to young school housekeeper Sofia (Alfonsina Carrocio), who has vague anti-authoritarian leanings. The movie's politics are frustratingly indistinct for a story so steeped in specific real-life events, and the tonal shift between cute animal antics and state-sponsored torture is jarring and ineffective. Instead of connecting Tom's personal story with the larger sociopolitical context, it just cheapens both aspects.
The Penguin Lessons is based on a memoir by the actual Tom Michell, who was in his early 20s at the time, but Pope and director Peter Cattaneo (The Full Monty) age the character by several decades, adding on a tragic backstory that he delivers in expository speeches to Juan Salvador. The filmmakers manage to make a sentimental story even more maudlin by fictionalizing it, without reaching any genuine emotion.
A gregarious Finnish physics teacher (Björn Gustafsson) and Buckle both also pour out their frustrations to Juan Salvador, but no one in The Penguin Lessons comes off like a real person. They're just vehicles for predictable conflicts and simplistic resolutions, which makes the intrusion of serious historical events especially off-putting.
Coogan delivers a few sarcastic remarks and gives a few soulful looks into the middle distance, but his performance is similar to his subdued, generically respectable work in fellow middlebrow true-story dramas Philomena and The Lost King. The Penguin Lessons isn't even the first movie released in the past year to be based on a true story about a middle-aged man in South America making a connection with a penguin he saves from an oil spill (that was My Penguin Friend). The Argentinean location could set The Penguin Lessons apart, but every aspect of the narrative is ground up into the same feel-good slop. In the end, there's nothing left to digest.
The Penguin Lessons
Rated PG-13
Directed by Peter Cattaneo
Starring Steve Coogan
