The Penguin Lessons

From the jaunty opening music and wry delivery of Steve Coogan’s introductory few lines, you'd be forgiven for experiencing a sinking sensation that we're back in whimsical British feel-good film territory: this time, with a cute, waddling bird. Happily, Peter Cattaneo’s new film offers a little more drama and nuance than you might fear, managing real emotion as well as a few laughs from deeply unusual subject matter.

Drawn from a 2015 memoir by Tom Michell, who Steve Coogan plays, this follows a misanthropic teacher who's cruising sourly through life, barely engaging, in an Argentinian boys’ school. Through an odd series of events, he ends up reluctantly adopting a penguin christened Juan Salvador — but he's also on the fringes of Argentina's 1976 military coup, and witnesses a left-leaning acquaintance being ‘disappeared’ by the military police. So it's Dead Poets Society meets I'm Still Here meets… Happy Feet?

Works surprisingly well to soften tough subject matter.

Some of this incident has been added or embroidered for the screen: Michell’s backstory has been shifted, presumably to fit Coogan, and the military regime has been made an immediate threat, in marked counterpoint to the cutesy penguin stuff. That gives some heft to what might otherwise have been weightless frippery, but it also necessitates some wild tonal swerves. Coogan has to go from sniping misanthrope to quietly earnest educator and liberal campaigner, as well as growing into his role as a reluctant penguin dad. He gradually wins over the audience just as he wins over his classroom, with the help of his avian sidekick, but it's an uphill battle from a deeply alienating start.

Despite all those odd elements, this still falls back on predictable beats: the tragic backstory, the educational breakthrough, the triumph and tragedy of life under dictatorship. The film’s saving grace is that Cattaneo and Coogan keep the rhythm sufficiently syncopated that you don't see all of them coming in advance – and, if you do, they still peck you right in the feels. It’s a wonder, really, that more British films, in a nation of animal lovers, don’t go the cute pet route, because this works surprisingly well to soften tough subject matter.