“South American penguins teach humans a valuable life lesson” may seem like an obscure film genre, but somehow, we’ve ended up with two of them in surprisingly short order. Last year there was the sweet My Penguin Friend about the true story of DinDim, a Magellanic penguin caught in an oil spill who befriended a Brazilian fisherman and taught him valuable life lessons. In the more mournful The Penguin Lessons, it’s Juan Salvador, a Magellanic penguin caught in an oil spill who befriends an English teacher in Argentina and teaches him valuable life lessons.
That’s both a teacher of English and a teacher who is English. Steve Coogan deploys the dry, crumpled, defensive humor that he displayed in 24 Hour Party People and The Trip as the real life Tom Michell, a dissolute grump and part-time lothario who has been bouncing around South America for an undetermined period of time. Now he’s washed up at a private boys’ school in Buenos Aries during the political turmoil of the 1970s and ends up as the proxy parent to Juan Salvador.
The rescue is definitely not out of pure altruism, but spring from Michell’s attempts to impress a woman he meets in a Uruguayan bar. It’s seemingly the setup for a very traditional tale of a repressed and sardonic Englishman being brought out of his shell by extraordinary circumstances. Luckily, screenwriter Jeff Pope has perfected the stories of these quietly desperate souls in films like The Lost King and Stan & Ollie. In adapting Michell’s bestselling memoir The Penguin Lessons: What I Learned From a Remarkable Bird, he takes some quite serious liberties to fit the story closer to his and Coogan’s strengths. After all, it’s hard to see the actor passing for 23, which is how old Michell actually was when he washed the tar off the feathers of his feathered confidante. Yet Pope seamlessly adds in just enough world weariness to make Coogan’s Michell less obnoxious and selfishly disinterested in the penguin or his charges’ education than he could initially seem.
While familiar territory for Pope and Coogan, it’s a return for director Peter Cattaneo to the politically tinged personal drama of his breakout work on The Full Monty. Initially, those heavier intentions are hindered in part by an obnoxiously jaunty score by Federico Jusid, but as those historical undertones become a predominant theme in the narrative, his string-based compositions move to the piano and become more discordant and disturbing. The plight of the school cleaner (El Jaber) and her granddaughter Sofia (Carrocio), and the number of people who disappear daily under the new military junta, move ever more to the fore. For British and Argentinian audiences, there’s the added political tension that only six years later Michell would have been expelled or detained as the two countries went to war over the Falkland – a remote series of Atlantic islands where the penguin population outweighs the humans by roughly 300 to 1.
Cattaneo and Pope avoid any anthropomorphism of Juan Salvador, and limit how much they attribute the humanization of Michell to having him around. That English restraint will always be there, even in moments of silliness and even as that levity gives way to darkness and sadness. The politics of the era do occasionally become a little slippery and heavy, as Michell gets his entitled students to consider the world beyond the classroom. Anyone just expecting a cutesy animal romp may be sorely disappointed, but that’s because this isn’t about the quietly expansive inner life of Juan Salvador. Even as he becomes an unwitting confessor for Michell and others – including Gustafsson as an earnest physics teacher and Pryce in a delightful turn as the headmaster – it’s always about the people his flippers have touched.
This article appears in March 28 • 2025.
