REVIEW: The Penguin Lessons - quirky, powerful and poignant

There is real power and poignancy in this slow-burning gem, the bizarre real-life story of the Englishman who went to Argentina and adopted… a penguin.

Steve Coogan is Tom Michell, on whose memoirs the film is based, the distanced, jaded, cynical English teacher drifting around South America who pitches up at a private boys school in Argentina in 1976 just as the country is seized by a coup.

Michell is aimlessly looking for easy gratification – just as the country is cataclysmically rocked. The film is the story of his wake-up call and reconnection. The quirkiness is that it comes when he reluctantly becomes guardian to a penguin. Michell is trying to impress a woman he meets in Uruguay. Together they come across an oil-covered penguin barely alive. The woman refuses simply to walk on by, and when she scurries back to her husband, the penguin becomes Michell’s problem – a problem he takes back to Argentina.

There, in the boys school, the penguin becomes everyone’s confidant. Even the grumpy headmaster (Jonathan Pryce) ends up pouring out his woes to the bird. The penguin even becomes the means by which Michell tames his wild class. A class he previously had absolutely zero interest in. Together, birds, boys and teachers discover something precious through the bird. The bird might be flightless, but through the bird they discover that they are not.

Possibly the first half of the film is somewhat less than gripping, but as the sinister events in the background move closer with the police abduction of a young woman who works at the school, the film gets inside you, growing powerfully… though always opting for charm rather than any real depiction of what is going on. Even when Michell himself gets beaten up by the police, he brushes it off.

But he’s still a fascinating character as we learn more about the tragedy which brought him to this point in his life – and as he grapples with the fact that he failed to intervene in the young woman’s abduction. The film starts slowly – but is ultimately all the stronger and all the more haunting for its slow-burn approach.