The Penguin Lessons, review: Not even Steve Coogan and his cute pet can save this twee tale

Telegraph

17-04-2025

Steve Coogan gives quite a tender performance in The Penguin Lessons – it's just a pity about the surroundings. He plays a teacher who has checked out, in this whimsical comedy-drama based on a memoir by said teacher, Tom Michell. This rumpled Brit abroad, who confesses to his life having being ruined when his 13-year-old daughter was killed by a drunk driver, might as well be giving English lessons to a classroom of sock puppets.
In fact, these are Argentinian schoolboys at the exclusive St George's College, the year is 1976, and the military junta is about to seize power. The teenagers are acutely aware of their parents' place in the pecking order – the bullies are mini fascists, essentially.
Tom is an erstwhile man of the Left, but he's warned by the pompous headmaster (a prissy Jonathan Pryce) that the school has a reputation to uphold, and only does politics with a small 'p'. He bundles away his convictions, and sets about doing the bare minimum.
An unlikely pet is the agent for change. This is a lovable penguin, dubbed 'Juan Salvador', which Tom rescues – mainly to impress a date – on a getaway in Uruguay, when they stumble across an oil slick on the beach. Without intending to adopt it, he's pushed in that direction by the stern stares of the authorities: a nice run of scenes letting Coogan play weak-willed in a familiarly cringey way.
When he smuggles the creature into class and lets his students feed it fish, it's a successful bribe for them to pay attention. Suddenly, Tom is Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society, sparking their imaginations to think about the meaning of freedom, using the verse of John Masefield.
Characterisation might have been a nice idea. Save for one sad sack no one likes, this classroom is an undifferentiated rabble, which hampers how effective the film can actually be as feel-good fare.
Peter Cattaneo, director of The Full Monty, is normally a surer hand with shading, but the script by Coogan's regular collaborator Jeff Pope (Philomena, The Lost King) also keeps defaulting to penguin lols – it waddles, it's cute, repeat – rather than giving the ensemble much to do.
There's a self-conscious gravity to the 'moral', which plays like the film patting itself on the back. Tom must rethink his caution as a form of cowardice, when his housekeeper's granddaughter Sofia (Alfonsina Carrocio), a feisty activist, is disappeared, and he plucks up the courage to ask questions.
We elide the beating-up he gets in custody, of course. 'Argentina's in chaos!', Pryce helpfully declares at the start, but everything gets tidied away, as in most fables about one man making a difference.
Coogan, like Tom, weathers this relatively unscathed. But Federico Jusid's tango-inflected score just won't stop plucking our heart-strings, as if keen to reassure us that we'll make it through one of the darkest periods in South America's history without the mood souring.
12A cert, 112 min. In cinemas from Friday April 18