A movie aspiring to be a droll animal-led comedy and an examination of a dictatorship has an intimidating number of needles to thread. The director of “The Penguin Lessons,” Peter Cattaneo, also made “The Full Monty,” so he has some experience with crowd-pleasing films, at the same time being deft with unusual subject matter.
The movie begins with a familiar disclaimer that it’s based on true events. The actor Steve Coogan plays Tom Michell, a teacher from southern England who is unhappily assigned to an upper-class boy’s school in 1970s Argentina. (Jeff Pope’s script is based on Michell’s memoir of the same title.)
On an idle day at the beach in nearby Uruguay, Tom encounters a penguin emerging from an oil spill. Hoping to impress a woman he’s met there, Tom brings the creature back to his hotel, cleans it off and tries to return it to the ocean. No luck. The penguin believes he’s made a friend.
Once Tom returns to Argentina, he contrives to make the penguin he has named Juan Salvador a teaching tool, and his English class becomes wildly successful. (While Juan Salvador is supposedly a creature of the wild, he executes all sorts of cute bits that only a trained performer can pull off.)
Things get serious when one of Tom’s housekeepers is swept up in the military dictatorship. Tom opts to abandon his apolitical facade because the penguin has taught him how to care about others. While Juan Salvador is a shameless exhibitionist, Coogan’s performance is understated; he conveys Tom’s softening without nudging the viewer too much. On the other hand, the misuse of Nick Drake’s “Northern Sky” on the soundtrack is egregious. The rest of the picture is largely winsome and inoffensive.
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