The Penguin Lessons: When a feel-good movie just feels off

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This article was published 28/03/2025 (494 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Cut into two different parts by an act of political violence that occurs midway through its story, this uneven and unsure comedy-drama, set in Buenos Aires in 1976, fights itself to a frustrating stalemate.

Starting with a strong first half, The Penguin Lessons leans into the snarky comic persona of star Steve Coogan, wringing some dark humour from the moral perils and emotional costs of ignoring fascism.

Unfortunately, the film’s more dramatic second half, which attempts to grapple with the threat of Argentina’s military dictatorship, is bad, sometimes uncomfortably so.

English-Irish actor Coogan made his name in cringe comedy, especially in his role as inept TV personality Alan Partridge. He’s done the semi-fictionalized, semi-improvised show The Trip with Rob Brydon, while also venturing into serious roles in the film Philomena and the controversial TV series The Reckoning.

Coogan can work in both comedy and drama, and sometimes, deftly, in both at once. Unfortunately, this would-be dramedy, scripted by Jeff Pope (who worked on Stan & Ollie, another Coogan project) and directed by Peter Cattaneo (The Full Monty), can’t pull off its tricky tonal balance and Coogan is left stranded.

Coogan plays Tom Michell, the real-life Englishman whose 2015 memoir forms the basis of this loose adaptation. Tom arrives in Buenos Aires to teach English at an Anglophilic boys boarding school run by a stuffy headmaster (Jonathan Pryce). On the way in from the airport, Tom tries not to notice the armed soldiers, the distant explosions and the political graffiti scrawled on walls.

“Argentina is in chaos,” the headmaster explains. “A military coup is imminent.”

This “ghastly business,” as the headmaster calls it, affects the rules for live-in teachers. Along with no loud music and no pets, it’s especially important they hold no political opinions.

Tom initially has no problem with that last requirement. Coogan, who has developed a real line in playing self-involved idiots and arrogant, egotistical jerks, has never been afraid to be unlikable, so it’s maybe not surprising that Tom’s immediate reaction to news of the coup is mostly relief that the school will now close for a week and he can head to Uruguay to get drunk and have sex.

Instead of picking up a woman on the beach, though, Tom ends up with a penguin. After he reluctantly rescues the bird from an oil slick, this dogged, determined little guy refuses to leave his side, hurrying after him on comically short legs and slapping flat feet.

Tom smuggles the penguin into the school, where young Sofia (Alfonsina Carrocio), an outspoken young Argentinian woman who works on the campus, decides to call him Juan Salvador, the name given to Jonathan Livingston Seagull in the Spanish translation of that very 1970s bestseller.

Tom, to this point a selfish, sardonic, sarcastic man who is emotionally shut-down and apathetic about teaching, is slowly transformed. With Sophia and Juan Salvador’s help, he reconnects with the world and once again commits to his students.

With Tom’s beige corduroy jacket and the film’s faded-Polaroid colours, The Penguin Lessons can feel like a 1970s version of the classic school-days genre.

Tom fires up the kids with literature: “Hamlet: Poet or Idiot?” he writes on the board. Is Byron “a tart?” he asks. It almost feels like a Buenos Aires-set version of Dead Poets’ Society — as if we might be heading toward boys standing on their desks and reciting O Captain! My Captain!

At this point, however, the new military junta starts to round up perceived dissidents. Trade unionists, socialists, intellectuals, journalists and students are snatched off the street and just disappear, their families left with the agony of not knowing what happened.

The film attempts to reckon with the horror of the so-called Dirty War while remaining a whimsical comedy.

At one point, Tom makes a dark joke about Nazis in Argentina, which as the dolorous Finnish physics teacher (Bjorn Gustafsson) suggests, “is not funny and also funny.”

If the filmmakers wanted to be “not funny and also funny,” they could have committed to savage satire — think The Death of Stalin levels — acknowledging this horrific historical period while somehow transmuting it into black comedy.

Alternatively, they could have just jettisoned the political context and given us a sweet, warm, funny story about a man and his bird. Coogan, after all, has good comic timing, and you know who has great comic timing? Oh my gosh, the penguin. This teacher’s pet is brilliant.

What the film tries to do, with increasingly ineffectual and awkward results, is to keep the humour light, even sappy, while using Argentina’s national trauma as a dramatic plot device.

The Penguin Lessons wants to be a feel-good movie. By the end, it just feels off.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca