Review: 'The Penguin Lessons' serves teacher cliches and a cute animal, tastelessly set on a backdrop of authoritarian horror

One of the most horrific things we’ve seen in recent days is the surveillance video of a Turkish woman, living in America on a student visa at Tufts University, being surrounded by masked thugs working for your federal government and hustling her into an unmarked car to take her Lord knows where.

This kind of jackbooted fascism is depicted in a moment of “The Penguin Lessons,” a movie set in Buenos Aires in 1976, where a military junta “disappeared” thousands of Argentinians for daring to speak out against authoritarian regime.

To call the scene in the movie “problematic” is mild to the point of absurdity, for a couple of reasons. One is that the focus is not on the young Argentinian woman being taken away, but on an observer — a middle-aged Englishman, played by Steve Coogan, as if to say he’s really the victim here.

The other is that the scene is made small by the odd juxtaposition in the middle of a whimsical comedy-drama about the Englishman and his unexpected companion, a penguin.

In this movie “inspired by true events” — and one imagines that word “inspired” is doing a lot of work here — Coogan plays Tom Michell, a misanthropic English teacher arriving at a new job at a boarding school in Buenos Aires, teaching the sons of Argentina’s ruling elite and military officers. 

Tom is sarcastic towards authority, embodied here by Jonathan Pryce’s turn as the headmaster. Tom is also a sad, unfocused figure, for reasons that are eventually explained but for the first half just make him look like a jerk.

When the school goes on an unexpected break, for safety reasons involving a military coup, Tom and Tapio (Buörn Gustafsson), a Swedish teaching colleague, take an impromptu trip to nearby Uruguay. Tom ends up spending the night walking the beach with an attractive woman (Mica Breque), and as they walk they find a penguin washed up in an oil slick. They sneak the penguin back to Tom’s hotel and clean it up — and Tom ends up the penguin’s reluctant caretaker.

Director Peter Cattaneo (“The Full Monty”) and screenwriter Jeff Pope (Coogan’s writing partner on “Philomena”) run through scenes with Coogan dutifully reciting Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Masefield to inspire his young charges, who inspire him to care again about his profession, and so on. Just think of any movie you’ve ever seen about a teacher, from “Dead Poets Society” to “Dangerous Minds” — and add a penguin.

Which brings me back to that kidnapping scene. Because the penguin turns the “whimsy” knob to 11, it makes the attempt at seriously depicting the Argentine junta’s brutality feel crass and exploitative. Thousands of people, we’re told, were never accounted for after they were “disappeared” — and this movie presents the idea that it wasn’t so bad because it helped a shaggy-haired Brit find his smile again.

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‘The Penguin Lessons’

★★

Opens Friday, March 28, at theaters. Rated PG-13 for strong language, some sexual references and thematic elements. Running time: 112 minutes; in English and Spanish with subtitles.