The Penguin Lessons is a harmless, safe, and sanitized crowd pleaser based on a true story that has plenty of darkness hiding in plain sight. It also has an adorable, precocious penguin sidekick, which is also part of the true story. When director Peter Cattaneo (The Full Monty) and screenwriter Jeff Pope (Philomena, Stan & Ollie) were faced with the choice of leaning into the darker, more historical side of things or the gambit that would draw in the bigger audience, they chose the latter, and I can’t completely fault them for it. This adaptation of former teacher Tom Michell’s time spent at a posh private academy in Argentina during the politically turbulent 1970s is a pretty good film that delivers solid mainstream fare with a touch of ambition. And did I also mention the penguin?
Played by Steve Coogan, Tom Michell is an English teacher broken down by life and circumstance who takes a job at prestigious St. Georges on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. Arriving in 1976, right at the infancy of the cataclysmic and tragic Dirty War, where tens of thousands of dissenters were “disappeared” by a military junta, Tom finds his students unreceptive to his teaching of classic literature, which is fine with him because he doesn’t much feel like teaching anyway. During a patch where the school is forced to shut down for a week due to escalating violence, Tom and a brokenhearted physics teacher from Finland (Björn Gustafsson) take a day trip to neighbouring Uruguay for some R&R. After a night out and while trying to impress a women that he wants to sleep with, Tom happens upon a distressed penguin on the beach, covered in oil from a nearby spill. Reluctantly and with the goading of his date, Tom brings the penguin back to his hotel to clean him up. The date doesn’t stick around, but the penguin does, having formed a bond to its rescuer. Through a series of comedic encounters with law enforcement, zoo officials, and border guards, Tom turns out to be stuck with this thing, forced to bring him back to St. Georges, where the prim and proper headmaster (Jonathan Pryce) has a strict “no pets” policy.
Eventually the bond between the penguin and his human counterpart will pay dividends for both. The fowl friend gets a nice veranda to spread out on where he can eat a bunch of fish, and Tom gets an unlikely, nonjudgmental therapist and companion that will help him connect to his students. The Penguin Lesson doesn’t make these turns of events feel like big reveals or foregone conclusions, but instead Cattaneo and Pope simply go with the flow of things. There’s an unfussy approach to The Penguin Lessons that’s pleasing instead of cloying. There are cliches aplenty, but also a lot of genuine humanity and warmth that’s earned rather than wrung from the audience like a wet towel in a hurry to get dry. It’s an easy film to like, even if the viewer feels like a lot is being left on the table by taking a safer path to its conclusion.
Cattaneo doesn’t lean too heavily on penguin hijinks to garner audience reactions. Refreshingly, the penguin – named Juan Salvador – is simply there and much like Tom, we have to accept its presence and acknowledge it’s not leaving anytime soon. The stuff in the classroom between Tom and his students is very much from the Dead Poets Society school of films about inspirational teachers and is the less compelling aspect of The Penguin Lessons. The real heart of the story comes from Tom’s burgeoning friendship with the school’s housekeepers, Maria (Vivian El Jaber) and her politically active granddaughter Sofia (Alfonsina Carrocio). Maria and Sofia are the only people who Tom feels he can have a meaningful conversation with amid a climate where school staff are told to keep things as apolitical as possible. Naturally, they’re also willing to keep the penguin thing under wraps. Scenes where Tom gets to know Maria and Sofia and share in their struggles in pain are vastly more effective and powerful than anything else happening at the school. Thankfully, Cattaneo and Pope give this aspect of The Penguin Lessons equal footing and don’t relegate it to a subplot.
There are few performers better suited to playing a nonplussed, over it, hardened British cynic than Coogan, and he brings his best to The Penguin Lessons. His best is appreciated, especially since his character has little tangible depth for almost the first ninety minutes of the film, with Pope unwisely holding back on almost any and all character detail about Tom until just before the final act. It’s not much of a reveal, but it does explain Tom’s demeanour. Before that, however, it’s entirely up to Coogan to hint at a lot of things the viewer frustratingly can’t see earlier on. He also has great chemistry with his penguin and human co-stars.
The Penguin Lessons follows an established template for this sort of picture, but if it wasn’t one that worked well in the past no one would use it at all. Tom learns to find some joy in life again. The students get hip to learning. People have preconceived notions and opinions changed for the better. The terrors of war will hit close to home, and an outsider will learn about the gravity of life in the place they’ll be calling home for awhile. It’s all basic, but also satisfying, building to a conclusion that hits in the right way, even if some of the timing feels a tad too dramatically convenient and rushed. The shortcomings here are obvious, but excusable, especially if all you want from a film is to be moved, and there are much worse things out there in the world today than that. Also, and I don’t know if I mentioned this or not, there’s a penguin.
The Penguin Lessons opens in select Canadian cities on Friday, March 28, 2025.
