‘The Penguin Lessons’ Review: Steve Coogan Finds His Happy Feet in a Gentle True-Life Tale
variety.comGuy Lodge Film Critic Argentina’s 1976 military coup d’état, along with the sustained period of violence and forced disappearances that it ushered in, isn’t an obvious historical backdrop for a heartwarming tale of human-animal bonding.
But that’s how the timing worked out for Tom Michell, an English teacher stationed at an elite Buenos Aires private school, at the time of the turmoil: With the country in chaos and many of his colleagues in crisis, he was figuring out what to do with the Magellan penguin he had accidentally adopted on a weekend jaunt to Uruguay.
His 2016 memoir of that period, “The Penguin Lessons,” was the kind of breezy read that bridges adult and juvenile tastes for animal stories; Peter Cattaneo‘s amiable film adaptation matches the book’s feathery whimsy while reaching for a little more political import.
Almost inevitably, it’s best when it’s about the bird. While Michell was in his twenties at the time of the events described in his book, this adaptation by screenwriter Jeff Pope (“Philomena”) has been retooled as a vehicle for Pope’s regular collaborator, 58-year-old Steve Coogan — with some somber backstory added to explain why an Englishman of that approximate age might still be spending his days adrift in South America.
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