Producers: Ben Pugh, Rory Aitken, Andy Noble, Adrián Guerra and Robert Walak Director: Peter Cattaneo Screenplay: Jeff Pope Cast: Steve Coogan, Jonathan Pryce, Vivian El Jaber, Björn Gustafsson, Alfonsina Carrocio, David Herrero, Julián Galli Guillén, Aimar Miranda, Nicanor Fernandez, Hugo Fuertes, Joaquín Lopez, Miguel Alejandro Serrano, Ramiro Blas, Florencia Nocetti, Micaela Breque, Romina Cocca, Tomás Pozzi, Juan M. Barreiro and Gera Maleh Distributor: Sony Pictures Classics
Grade: B-
Penguins have never gone out of fashion as delightful movie fodder: they’ve marched in documentaries and exhibited their happy feet in animated form, and this year they’ve served as buddies to humans in two live-action dramedies based on real stories. The first was “My Penguin Friend,” with Jean Reno as a man whose grief and gruffness melted under the influence of one. Now arrives “The Penguin Lessons,” with Steve Coogan as a teacher whose cynicism collapses when reluctantly paired with another.
Adapted, very loosely of course, by Jeff Pope from Tom Michell’s 2016 memoir, “Lessons” stars Steve Coogan as a world-weary, tart-tongued Brit who arrives in Buenos Aires in 1976 to teach English to the pampered sons of the country’s elite at St. George’s College. It happens that his coming coincides with a military coup in which the hapless President Isabel Perón, third wife of the deceased Juan, is overthrown and replaced by a ruthless junta.
When the school temporarily closed amidst the turmoil, Michell, looking for a good time, travels to Uruguay and links up at a bar with a local woman he hopes to have a one-night stand with. She ultimately admits she’s married and demurs at his proposal, but during a walk on the beach they come upon a penguin soaked in oil from a spill, and she insists they take it back to his hotel room and clean it off. She leaves, but the penguin becomes attached to him, and the hotel staff won’t let him leave it behind when he checks out, so he finds himself transporting it, not without some difficulty at customs, back to Buenos Aires and hiding it in his quarters at St. George’s despite the “no pet” policy of rigid headmaster Buckle (Jonathan Pryce).
From this point the movie is about the humanization, or re-humanization, of Michell on two interrelated tracks. One concentrates; on his relationship with the bird, and the way everyone else reacts when they discover the existence of Juan Salvador, the name he bestows on it after the title character in the Spanish edition of Richard Bach’s 1970 sensation “Jonathan Livingston Seagull.” His housekeeper Maria (Vivian El Jaber) and her lovely granddaughter Sophia (Alfonsina Carrocio) grow fond of it despite the messes it causes, his bewildered faculty colleague, the Swedish physics prof Michel (Björn Gustafsson) becomes a fan, and even Buckle’s hostility eventually wilts. They all find Juan easy to share their problems with; he’s a good listener, and never criticizes.
And when Michell introduces Juan to his students, the bird proves a big hit. Animosity on the part of boys from right-wing homes against the shy classmate from a Peronist one ceases, and the students’ apathy and unruliness decline as their level of achievement increases.
Simultaneously Michell is forced to confront the reality of the ongoing governmental change when left-leaning Sophia is carted off by agents of the new regime as he watches and does nothing. Wracked with guilt over his inaction, he prods Buckle to use his influence with powerful parents to intervene, and even approaches a sinister security man to help, using Juan as a kind of bait. He also begins peppering his lessons with pacifist poems, to the distress of the headmaster, who prefers an apolitical stance to protect the school.
The effort to balance the story’s crowd-pleasing, penguin-centered uplift with the background of regime brutality isn’t very successful. The former might be pretty standard stuff but works well enough; the latter, which reduces a tragedy of major proportions—thousands of citizens disappeared in the years when the junta was in power—to a single, melodramatic case doesn’t come near to doing justice to the reality. And bringing the two together in the finale, which joins the sadness of loss with a subdued sense of triumph, feels like a cop-out.
What goes far to rescue things is the presence of Coogan, a past master of the sarcastic quip and the mournful deadpan reaction shot, skills he employs to the full here. And he’s fortunate in having some accomplished foils to play off—the redoubtable Pryce, of course, but also the poignant El Jaber and the gentle, persistently baffled Gustafsson, whose long absence at one point is a genuine loss. One can’t, of course, ignore Coogan’s interplay with the boys, either; but it’s his scenes with the penguin, played by real birds with only a few instances of VFX or CGI, that will win most viewers over.
Aside from the cast and the penguin handlers, one can credit director Peter Cattaneo (“The Full Monty”) for giving them the room to shine, as well as a technical crew—production designer Isona Rigau, cinematographer Xavi Giménez and editors Robin Peters and Tariq Anwar—who deliver a handsome, unhurried package. A score by Federico Jusid highlights the perky moments as well as the melancholy ones.
No classic, perhaps, but fans of Coogan—and of penguins—will find enough in this warmhearted if uneven parable of redemption to enjoy.