‘The Penguin Lessons’ Review: A Profoundly Misguided Heartwarmer
While Peter Cattaneo’s The Penguin Lessons contains a memorable lead turn from Steve Coogan, one can’t wash the foul taste the film leaves with its ill-conceived trivialization of Argentina’s Dirty War.
Am I the only one who felt profoundly uncomfortable watching Peter Cattaneo’s The Penguin Lessons? Not that the story itself, which is based on the memoir of the same name by Tom Michell, isn’t important. In fact, in his book, Michell respectfully recounts the harrowing experiences he endured while in Argentina during the Dirty War, a period of military dictatorship and state terrorism that took place from 1974 to 1983. Activities were state-controlled, and dissidents who spoke out against the fascistic government would get arrested and be never heard from again, either killed or disappeared in an undisclosed location. The obligatory biopic pre-end credits text informs us that more than 30,000 victims of the Dirty War were killed or disappeared, with their whereabouts still unknown to this day.
During this time, Michell (played in the movie by Steve Coogan) accepted an English teaching job at a private school and formed a unique relationship with a penguin he rescued after it was the victim of an oil slick spill. The movie attempts to showcase how hope can be found in the most unlikely of locations – and politically-dense eras – but director Peter Cattaneo and writer Jeff Pope treat this story, and event, as if it’s a screwball comedy, with little to no respect given to the real-life victims of Argentina’s military dictatorship, making what should’ve been a heartwarming trip at the movies a profoundly misguided and ill-conceived political drama.
The thing is: you don’t get the director of The Full Monty to make a dramedy where the Dirty War is trivialized and joked about as if such an event was unimportant in Argentina’s history, and that the actual human cost of the military dictatorship can easily be brushed over and ignored, which is how Michell’s perspective is depicted in the movie, when the source material is far more reflexive of the period he lived in. Cattaneo has already proved that he doesn’t care about any of the subjects he depicts, whether in his 1997 (vastly overrated) Oscar-nominated production, in his 2019 film Military Wives, or in his latest motion picture, which turns a serious subject matter into a complete farce.
Some will argue that joking about harrowing events isn’t unfamiliar, as Roberto Benigni won several Oscars for his World War II dramedy Life Is Beautiful. However, both films have a fundamental difference: Benigni understood when to dial down the humor to treat the Holocaust with a level of respect and never once trivializes the real-life human cost of such an event. He knows it’s a sensitive subject to depict, and it’s why he never once exploits its horrors in the form of comedy, unlike what Jerry Lewis (allegedly, since it remains unreleased) did with The Day the Clown Cried. That’s why it was lauded upon its release and has stood the test of time as one of the best films made on World War II. Benigni wasn’t doing anything to dilute the impact of the event. All he wanted was to create a movie on the resilience of the human spirit, and, in that regard, he more than succeeded.
One never understands what Cattaneo wants to do with Coogan’s Tom Michell in The Penguin Lessons, who’s introduced as a somewhat egocentric professor, taking a job in Argentina at the height of the military dictatorship. Within the first five minutes of the picture, one can tell Cattaneo doesn’t care about the backdrop, because he wouldn’t have incorporated shoddily-executed slapstick into his movie, such as Michell getting sucker-punched in the face by his apartment’s housekeeper (played by Vivian El Jaber) or any instance of the penguin taking a dump anywhere it goes, with extended discussions on how “penguin shit” can be cleaned. It’s not only terribly unfunny but profoundly tasteless, given the circumstances the film is set in, yet refuses to engage with, either in its surface-level anti-fascist comments (Michell is teaching his students on resistance against oppressive forces through politically-charged poetry) or how it purposefully ignores the repercussions this event had for Argentinians when the dictatorship ended.
And instead of focusing on the implications of such an event for Michell, Cattaneo switches gears and tells an unconventional animal/human connection story while purposefully ignoring the broader sociopolitical context the movie is set in, even though it’s an integral part of the source material! After Tom saves the life of Juan Salvador, the animal has now formed a bond with the human, and he is now forced to take care of him, leading to Michell’s telegraphed evolution from self-centered to a better person, all because of the kinship he develops with the penguin. He’s become more confident, and his students now respect him because he uses Juan Salvador as an integral part of his teaching. The animal's innocence now represents the innocence the human characters hope to achieve.
From there, The Penguin Lessons dvides itself into two distinct movies, one unlike the other: the “heartwarmer” involving Tom and Juan Salvador, as he learns there’s much more to life than being an asshole, whether in his teaching, on his interactions with other people, and the military dictatorship drama that desperately wants to be in the same vein as Walter Salles’ I’m Still Here. It may not be a coincidence that Sony Pictures Classics, the same studio that backed Salles’ Oscar-winning movie, distributed The Penguin Lessons for its obvious parallels to what happened in Brazil and what is currently unfolding in the United States.
However, Cattaneo has little to say about the military dictatorship in its broader context or how it affects Michell. The only times we feel, in any way, for the protagonists, occur during a dinner table conversation. For the first time ever, Michell opens up about his deceased daughter and tells his colleagues things he otherwise would’ve kept to himself. However, his relationship with Juan Salvador reminds him so much of the purest possible form of innocence that he eventually tells it all in front of people he initially didn’t trust.
Frederico Jusid’s “cutesy” score stops playing, and Cattaneo envelops the moment with so many ambient noises that they inadvertently become part of the character’s long, pronounced silences as he holds back on wanting to discuss his past until he breaks down and lets it all out. If anything, the movie is worth watching solely for Coogan’s nuanced portrayal of Tom Michell, far removed from his usual comedic schtick and more layered than one would expect from the veteran British actor. But it also reminds us of his true talent, which few sadly recognize when talking about Coogan.
He gives some humanity to an otherwise cold portrayal of an event that doesn’t need to be ridiculed like this, especially when it attempts to give human stakes by constantly reminding us of Argentina’s surveillance state and how the country’s military police would kidnap victims who stood up to their fascistic regime and would never be seen again. How it minimizes this aspect, in particular, left a strong foul taste in my mouth that could never be washed away by the antics of a cute penguin, despite the “awwwws” many (over 75-year-old) audience members were uttering at the film’s first public screening. I felt particularly uncomfortable in the cinema while most of the spectators were laughing when Cattaneo made light on the Argentina police arresting people under no basis, and turning it into a recurring gag, until one person close to Tom gets arrested, attempting to “break” the comedy he established with such an emotionally manipulative moment doesn’t work, given the circumstances the film is depicting.
There isn’t anything funny about the Dirty War. There isn’t anything funny about living under a military dictatorship. There isn’t anything funny about the innocent lives lost, and the fact that many family members are still looking for answers on the disappearances of their loved ones, with the current Argentinian government refusing to give them any. Could you imagine being in their shoes for one second?
If you were, you wouldn’t be laughing at how Cattaneo cartoonishly depicts such an event, especially when his film is about nothing concrete, ot but journey of self-discovery Michell takes through his relationship with Juan Salvador. It’s great that he learned to become a better person, but it’s not so great that he did so under the cloak of one of the darkest periods in Argentina’s history, which the country is still recovering from. This is how the movie depicts it, not how Michell wrote it. But this is what you get when you hire Peter Cattaneo to bring this story to life, a filmmaker that doesn’t care, nor respects, the subject matter he has treated, ever since the release of The Full Monty.