Penguins don’t usually live among humans. When they do, we tend to think that’s pretty clever. What an unusual penguin, we think, doing things with humans and not other penguins.
We got that movie last year and we must be lucky because we are getting it again this year. Last year it was My Penguin Friend, a movie about a penguin who becomes a man’s friend. This year it’s The Penguin Lessons, a movie about a penguin who teaches lessons.
About ten lifetimes ago, we got an adaptation of Mr. Popper’s Penguins (2011), a movie about a man called Mr. Popper and his penguins. At first, Mr. Popper isn’t too sure about his penguins, but they teach him lessons and then he becomes their friend. There are roughly two (2) types of stories about penguins and humans.
In The Penguin Lessons, a misanthropic English teacher played by Steve Coogan is taught a lot about compassion by Juan Salvadore, an orphaned penguin rescued from the beach, who is neither misanthropic nor an English teacher.
Equally heart-warming and winning, as the relationship between Coogan’s character and his Penguin is filled in with definition, the movie takes a charming shape. The teacher is just trying to make some difference and otherwise basically get laid during his free time in 1970s Argentina, where a totalitarian political regime is disappearing people into the ocean — and that’s all fine and well until this young woman disappears and it reminds him of his lost daughter.
It’s kind of a funny story and it’s based on a true one, adapted from a memoir. The series of events which keep the penguin in the teacher’s care are funny and well paid off but also metaphorically just like the penguin who can not be let out alone without his companions the movie is about the necessity of connection — by man or penguin — and how caring for something outside ourselves makes our inner selves stronger. There is poetic resonance too, as the teacher instructs on poems like Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Rise Like the Lions After Slumber,” which speaks both to the interpersonal story and unfolding political reality of this time and place, as it is recited:
Rise like lions after slumber/In unvanquishable number/Shake your chains to earth like dew/Which in sleep had fallen on you/Ye are many, they are few
Director Peter Cattaneo (you may know The Full Monty, 1997) cooks the movie evenly on all sides and it comes out just right, tender but with enough to it that you can invest in it. When Coogan’s teacher reaches the end of the rope, the school board says it’s either you or the penguin and he says, “if I go, the penguin can stay?” and that’s emblematic of the dry witty big heart at the center of this animals-teaching-humans charmer.