THE PENGUIN LESSONS (Peter Cattaneo 2024)

[Chris Knipp]

PETER CATTANEO: THE PENGUIN LESSONS (2024)

Coogan and the bird

It's hard to tell a heartwarming tale about a cute animal in the setting of a brutal dicttorship like the one in 1970's Argentina. But that's what Tom Michell's memoir is. He began teaching at a posh Buenos Aires private school right when the 1976 coup was just beginning. On a trip to Uraguay when the takeover causes a temporary shutdown of the school, Michell winds up adopting a penguin. It's not plausible but it's true. It's not funny either, but it's interestingly peculiar. It's something suited to the unique dry humor of Steve Coogan, or it must have seemed so. The recreation of seventies Argentina - the architecture, the colors, the decor, the clothes, is very well done, that much is sure. And Coogan's deadpan dryness is always watchable, and works in this realistic story as well as it does in comedy.

Peter Cattaneo, who directed The Full Monty, has helmed the film from the memoir with Coogan indeed in the lead, unless you consider the penguin that, which is arguable. The penguin is cute, maybe too cute: he steals every scene he's in. As usual, reviewers give opposite advice. A singnificent one , in the Guardian, says the movie would have been much better if it had had more politics. Another big one, Guy Lodge in Variety, says it's best when it focuses on the bird. Really the trouble is that these two topics don't get along well together. And Federico Jusid’s score, with its loud bandoneon, piano, classical guitar and click-clacking guiro, threatens to drown out the dialogue. This is an oddity, and is best be appreciated simply as that, as something that only Steve Coogan could carry off, or try to.

The trjectory is of a disappointed, ruined man who is somehow nudged by being in the company of friendly penguin to gradually care more and be a better person. He originally saved the big wobbly-walking bird just to imipress a women he wanted to have sex with. But then he winds up helping gain the release of the desaparecida anti-coup cleaning lady at the school, and daring to bring the penguin to his literature class, where it has a transforming effect on the boys and on him; and he becomes a mensch in his own eyes.

This is really the main idea of the film: taking the penguin, with its odd backstory, to class tames the unruly, spoiled sons of privilege in the class, and in this improved environment he is able to be a good teacher. The film even includes some specific class content. First Michell gets fired, with the penghin. Then the stiff headmaster Buckle (Jonathan Pryce), shamed by Michel's newfound courage, invites him and the penguin back.

This is a perennially appealing subject: the schoolteacher who dares to, or can't help being, different, and who by being so makes converts of his students. To prove it, Michell grants Headmaster Buckle that the boys have moved from "failing to below average," and they graduate with smiles. You get your happy ending. But the closing caption reminds you that during the regime, which Michell stayed for another two years of, there were ultimately thirty thousand "disappeared ones." Not a very happy ending there. (For an important recent film about the impact of "disappeared ones" in a dictatorship, Brazil's in this case, see Walter Salles' recent Best International Feature Oscar-winning I'm Still Here).

But what is Steve Coogan doing here, in this place so far from England or the Continent, his usual purview? That's hard to say. But his usual collaborator Jeff Pope has to alter the book source to fit Coogan, because not surprisingly, Tom Michell was only in his twenties when this risky foolishness originally happened. Pope gives the Coogan version a tragedy that took place seventeen years earlier to explain why Michell would be wandering at Coogan's age (late fifties) from one South American country to another teaching English with increasing boredom and lack of commitment - till a penguin and a dictatorship wake him up. This makes the story more dark and melancholy. Does it add more uplift? You be the judge.

The Penguin Diaries, 110 mins., debuted at Toronto, and was the opening night film at San Francisco's Mostly British festival Thursday Feb. 6, 2025. It opens in US theaters Mar. 28, 2025. Metacritic rating: 53%.