Life
The Penguin Lessons: ‘Steve Coogan p-p-picks one up’
Steve Coogan’s English teacher takes up a position at a boarding school in Buenos Aries in the 1970s, where a military coup and a penguin upend his life
April 16, 2025 17:50
Steve Coogan’s English teacher takes up a position at a boarding school in Buenos Aries in the 1970s, where a military coup and a penguin upend his life
April 16, 2025 17:50Even Mengele was a good doctor to some people,” Steve Coogan’s English teacher muses. It is a funny line because Coogan’s apparently irredeemably cynical Tom Michell has just taken up a position in a Buenos Aries boys’ school in the early 1970s where the punctilious head is played by Jonathan Pryce. “In fact, doesn’t he live round here?” adds Michell.
Based on the real-life Michell’s memoir, Coogan plays a peripatetic tutor who takes up his first job in Argentina just as the country falls to a military coup. During an enforced week off when the junta takes power, Michell heads to Uruguay to take in some dancing and maybe meet a woman. He does, but also a penguin who he discovers covered in oil while walking on the beach early one morning with the previous evening’s dance partner.
The bond is not with the married woman, but with the bird, who refuses freedom and opts to stick to him as determinedly as oil once stuck to him
At her behest, he reluctantly takes both the woman and the penguin back to the hotel to clean up the bird. It is a kindly act that forms an emotional bond Michell has not felt for decades. That bond, however, is not with the married woman, but with the bird, who refuses freedom and opts to stick to Michell as determinedly as the oil once stuck to him.
Arriving after I’m Still Here, the superb real-life biographical drama about life under Brazil’s brutal dictatorship in the early 1970s, this English take on South American totalitarianism directed by The Full Monty’s Peter Cattaneo could so easily have felt exploitative and a vehicle to display Coogan’s talent. Jeff Pope’s screenplay certainly offers up many a dry one-liner to its non-feathered star.
However, aware of this danger, due respect is paid to at least some of the reality that goes with living under a fascist dictatorship. This is especially true when Michell is frozen with fear as he witnesses the arrest of one of the school’s maids with whom he has formed a friendship.
Michell’s brand of couldn’t-care-less, which we learn is rooted in his own personal tragedy, is inevitably softened by his friendship with the bird. The film resolves in exactly the way one expects, but Coogan is always watchable and if you get to the end without shedding a tear, you are of harder heart than me.
The Penguin Lessons
Classification: 12A
★★★