The Penguin Lessons (12A) |Close-Up Film Review

I used to think way back in the Alan Partridge days that Steve Coogan was just a comedian, whose comedy wasn’t to my taste.   I was wrong.   Since then he’s shown himself to be a first class actor, writer and indeed producer. 

I first took him seriously as an actor playing Tony Wilson in Michael Winterbottom’s 24 hour Party People about the Manchester music scene in the 80s.   On several of his films he’s acted as writer and/or producer and/or co-star, including my favourite, Philomena.  And was recently starring as Dr Strangelove in the West End.  In The Penguin Lessons written by frequent collaborator Jeff Pope and directed by Peter Cattaneo, he confines himself to an executive role and playing the lead.

It’s a strange hybrid of a film.  Based on a memoir by Tom Michell, Coogan plays Tom, a grumpy, middle aged schoolteacher working in a boys public school in Buenos Aires in 1976.  He pops over the border into Venezuela for a short holiday in a seaside resort, where he meets a pretty girl he hopes to get off with.   To impress her, he helps her rescue a penguin that’s got caught in an oil slick.   He doesn’t get the girl but he does get the attention of the penguin, who attaches himself to Tom like a stray dog, forcing him to reluctantly take his new friend back into Argentina and smuggle him into the school.

His secret room mate is soon rumbled by the housekeeper Maria (Vivian El Jaber) and given a name, Juan Salvador.  And pretty soon Juan Salvador becomes a favourite with the schoolboys and starts turning grumpy old care for nobody Tom into a better teacher and a nicer human being.   Aaahh!

Hang on a moment though, this is Argentina in 1976, a country in chaos with a military dictatorship, whose agents will throw in jail anyone whose views they don’t like.   Such a one is Maria’s granddaughter Sofia (Alfonsina Carrocio).   While Tom doesn’t exactly stage a heroic rescue of her, he does his very English best during a genuinely tense scene in a café with a member  of the military establishment, which results in Tom experiencing a taste – just a taste – of brutal military dictatorship behaviour.   Which we don’t see incidentally.  This is too gentle a film for that.

As well as Coogan and of course the very lovable penguin, there’s  a good performance from Jonathan Pryce as the rather feeble headmaster, who like Tom develops a bit of late life backbone and Björn Gustafsson, as Tapio, who has some of the best comedy scenes with Coogan, playing a colleague who just doesn’t get Tom’s very English use of irony. 

Coogan’s skill manages to hold this sometimes uneasy mixture of elements together.  It does though seem a little feeble after so recently seeing Walter Sallis’s I’m Still Here, which dealt with the effect of the 25 year military dictatorship in neighbouring Brazil from the 60s to the 80s and was made of much stronger mettle.