“The Penguin Lessons,” by Peter Cattaneo, showing at the Martha’s Vineyard Film Center starting Friday, May 9, will tickle your funny bone and touch your heart. Tom Michell (Steve Coogan) plays alongside a real-life penguin costar with deadpan earnestness in this comedy drama.
Although full of humor, “The Penguin Lessons” is a poignant film, perhaps more so because it is based on the memoir of the same title by English author and teacher Tom Michell.
The movie takes place in an unlikely setting at a turbulent time — a school for privileged rich boys in 1976 Buenos Aires. We meet the disillusioned Tom as he is dropped off to begin a new job as an English teacher. Guards immediately come at him with rifles, as the country is on the brink of a military coup. When the headmaster (Jonathan Pryce) welcomes Tom, he tells him that the boarding school stays out of politics. Keep the headmaster’s words in mind as the film continues.
When the coup begins, Tom goes off on holiday to Uruguay. At a nightclub, he briefly meets an alluring young woman, though his courting leaves something to be desired. When she comments, “I think everybody who comes here is looking for something. What are you looking for?” he replies without a hint of sarcasm, “I’m like Ernest Hemingway but with no money and I haven’t written any books.”
Later that night, the two go for a romantic walk on the beach and happen upon an oil spill. Enter a lovable, pint-size penguin, whom the woman insists they rescue, while Tom is ready to leave him to die in the muck. Thus, a relationship begins not between Tom and the woman, but between Tom and the penguin. Tom wants nothing to do with the cute little guy, and there are some very funny scenes where he tries to get rid of him. “I was trying to impress a woman I wanted to have sex with. Now I ended up with no sex and a penguin,” he tells a customs officer. Try as he might to part ways with the bird, whom he names Juan Salvador, they return to the school together.
Their relationship weaves in and out of Tom’s time at the school, where he is an ineffective teacher, a lousy coach, and a reluctant friend to a fellow teacher (Björn Gustafsson), a housekeeper (Vivian El Jaber), and her granddaughter (Alfonsina Carrocio). Tom guards his heart, and doesn’t want to get involved in people or politics, which proves difficult, as citizens are taken by force right off the street. Tom does evolve as the situation becomes more dire in the country, and Juan Salvador connects him to the people in his life. By the end, we grasp the multiple meanings of the film’s title.
