At this particular juncture in history, what are we meant to take from a film about a man politically radicalised by a penguin? It’s unclear – but still, The Penguin Lessons persists. And not only does the flightless bird at its centre melt the heart of a full-time cynic (logically played by Steve Coogan), but it inspires him to take (minor) action against the US-backed military dictatorship in Argentina, as it spreads terror through the so-called “Dirty War” of the late Seventies and early Eighties.
Anyone believed to be associated with socialism, communism, or any other left-wing ideology was targeted. An estimated 30,000 were killed or disappeared. The film’s desire to tackle these horrors without ever discomforting its audience doesn’t play here as gentle entreaty – certainly not in the way its director Peter Cattaneo previously balanced social realism and feel-good, underdog victory in The Full Monty (1997). It plays, instead, like moral negligence.
Its man-penguin meet cute is adapted directly from Tom Michell’s 2015 memoirs about teaching in a Buenos Aires boys’s prep school. But the idea that the penguin’s… innocence? Curiosity? Steadfastness? … would move the stridently apolitical Tom to action, after trouble comes for the school’s Argentinian staff (Vivian El Jaber and Alfonsina Carrocio), is an invention of screenwriter Jeff Pope.
And so The Penguins Lessons becomes distracted by a rote arc about a British expat so disconnected from the world that news of a military coup is relevant only if he gets the week off work, while employed in a cloistered institution run by a sniffy headmaster (Jonathan Pryce) who preaches the importance of “small ‘p’” politics. His grand, climactic act of heroism, despite being fictional, doesn’t amount to much more than saying “pretty please” to a fascist brute.
Coogan can play Tom’s cutthroat sarcasm with ease (when asked why he’s not a fan of rugby, he snarls, “I like my balls round.”). So, too, can he handle the character’s slimy desperation when, in the first days of the dictatorship, he pops off on holiday to Uruguay with the science teacher (Björn Gustafsson), in search of women. He rescues a Magellanic penguin from an oil spill in an attempt to impress one. She leaves after they’ve hosed him down in the hotel bathtub. “I’ve ended up with no sex and a penguin,” he grumbles. The creature won’t leave his side.
Yet Coogan doesn’t quite have the earnestness (and perhaps no actor would have the earnestness) to sell the scenes in which Tom monologues to the penguin about his political apathy or the inevitable tragic backstory that made him who he is – all while the penguin, who he names Juan Salvador, waddles about and cocks his head. In fact, nearly everyone, at some point, ends up monologuing at the penguin.
And, yes, Cattaneo does shoot the short-statured avian in a way that makes it look as if he might really be an active listener. But when it’s revealed that many of the students are the children of those embedded deep in the military junta and that they like to play a game called “torture the socialist”, the film does nothing to address their indoctrination beyond letting Juan Salvador potter up and down their classroom and Tom recite a little Percy Bysshe Shelley. Sure, penguins can do an impressive amount. But, despite what The Penguins Lessons implies, that does not extend to singlehandedly defeating fascism.
Dir: Peter Cattaneo. Starring: Steve Coogan, Jonathan Pryce, Vivian El Jaber, Björn Gustafsson. 12A, 112 minutes.
‘The Penguin Lessons’ is in cinemas from 18 April
