One imagines the elevator pitch. “It’s kind of like Missing meets Dead Poets society. Only with a Penguin. And Alan Partridge.”
It’s a true story, apparently. There is some home movie footage at the end of an actual penguin in an actual swimming pool in an actual school, and also an actual demonstration in support of the Argentinian "disappeared”.
But I'd wager it isn't really a true story. Very likely a teacher in an English speaking school in Argentina really did keep an unusual pet. But I bet he didn’t tell an Ecuadorian customs official “I was trying to impress a woman I wanted to have sex with. I ended up with no sex. And a penguin.” And it's that kind of dialogue; and Steve Coogan's delivery of it, which carries the film.
Last month we saw Coogan playing all the Peter Sellars parts, and one non-Peter Sellars part, in the film of the stage play of the film of Doctor Strangelove. He can totally do characters. He was more like Stan Laurel than Stan Laurel and also did a horror film about Jimmy Saville. But in these relatively straight roles, there is unavoidable Partridge in the delivery. He says that in life sometimes you have to put the penguin in the pool, and then explains that that's a metaphor. Tongue-tied. British. Not quite getting the register right. It's very, very funny and it carries the movie. Jonathan Pryce as the pompous headmaster with the heart of gold is a very successful foil for him.
So: Tom Michel is an English teacher in an English speaking Argentinian boarding school. On a break in Ecuador he rescues a penguin from an oil slick; and the penguin bonds with him, so he is forced to take it home and conceal it in his room at the boarding school. With hilarious consequences.
But it is 1976; there has just been a coup and a military Junta has seized power. Inflation is so out of control that you have to spend all your wages on the day you receive them. Sofia, one of the domestic staff at the school, is openly critical of the fascists. The consequences of which are not very funny at all.
So the film is a bit of a compromise between two registers. Coogan, Pryce and Gustafasson (the Swedish science teacher) are playing identifiable types; and the schoolboys are simply place-holders. We're completely uninterested in how a teacher would actually present English poetry to Spanish speaking teens. Like every English teacher in every movie, the focus is all on inspiration and speaking to the heart. Masefield is about freedom and Shelley is about freedom. There are no essays on minor characters or fronted adverbials here. Where Robin Williams made his pupils stand on desks, Coogan makes them lie on the floor. When he loses the boys attention the classroom dissolves into a mass of paper darts and screwed up paper. One of the boys even puts a drawing pin on his chair like something out of El Ninos de le Calle Bash. But he wins them over by bringing the penguin to class and telling the boys that if they pay attention to the lesson they can help him feed it in lunchbreak.
But all this runs parallel to a darker thread in which Sofia is arrested --“disappeared”-- by fascist thugs; and her family begin an apparently hopeless struggle to free her. Sofia's family are drawn much more naturalistically, and the scenes in the family home have a clear tang of documentary realism. Tom, like his penguin, has been taken out of his natural environment and put in an alien context; which is maybe reflected by the feeling that two rather different films have been squished together. The analogy between Tom and his pet is stated a little too bluntly in the final scene, which tries, unconvincingly to bring the two threads together. The final denouement made me think of Oscar Wilde and Little Nell.
But on the whole, it works. The first half, as Tom reluctantly bonds with his unwanted pet are genuinely funny. And Coogan's characterisation as (stop me if you've heard this before) the penguin brings the repressed teacher out of his emotional shell is convincingly and sensitively done. Tom finally takes a moral stand, and remains rather embarrassing and inept but still very much in character. And of course, the movie is more or less guaranteed an Oscar for “best performance by a flightless bird.”
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