Yesterday we went to see the new Steve Coogan movie called The Penguin Lessons. I must admit that I had not heard of the movie before we booked it, but I am a big fan of Steve Coogan and his co-star Jonathan Pryce. This is a true life story set in 1976 Argentina and is about a Brit named Tom Mitchell. It is directed by Peter Cattaneo, who you may remember burst on the scene almost thirty years ago with The Full Monty, one of the great and yet poignant comedies of our time. What was so interesting to Kim and me was the timing of this viewing. Having just returned from Buenos Aires a week ago and having seen a revival of the Las Madres de Plaza de Mayo protest on the Plaza de Mayo in front of the Casa Rosada, seeing the original protestors in the movie of mothers who mourned the disappearance of their activist children and grandchildren was pretty relevant to us. Just watching the scenes in Buenos Aires of the black and yellow-roofed taxis running around the timeless monuments of the city felt very familiar. At one point when Coogan takes a break to go to Uruguay, that too felt pretty familiar to us, having spent a day in Montevideo seeing the differences in the socio-political paths taken by the two close neighboring countries.
In the movie, Coogan plays a disaffected English teacher who takes an assignment at an elitist private school in BA. It is called St. George’s College (though the students were sort of middle school age). Funny thing is that the name St. George’s is a rather ubiquitous name for international schools teaching the British system around the world. We had one in Rome when I was there in high school (attending Notre Dame International Prep), but there are also ones in Luxembourg, Cologne, Madrid and even Santiago Chile and Buenos Aires Argentina. The grounds of the school are lovely, the student roster boasts the sons of the rich and famous of Argentina that want their kids to have a British patina, and the rules are strict as dispensed by the headmaster, played by Pryce. Pryce has a thing about Argentine roles since his portrayal of Pope Francis has recently been highlighted in a previous blog story. The rules for teachers, as expressed by Pryce to Coogan on his orientation tour, is no women, no alcohol and no pets. Other than that, Coogan is given quite a nice little apartment complete with maid service.
It is clear from the start that Coogan couldn’t care less about teaching or really anything as he drifts through his duties on a perfunctory basis, paying no mind to the students and not minding that they pay no attention to him either. Along the way, he befriends the maid and her granddaughter, who is a bit of a left-leaning firebrand. Then the upheaval in Argentina, as the military junta takes control of the country, intercedes and closes the school for a week to allow things to calm down. In that time, Coogan goes to Punta del Este in Uruguay for some fun. During a romantic walk on the beach at night, he stumbles across a flock of penguins who have been covered by oil from a spill. One of them is alive and at the urging of his paramour of the moment, he saves the penguin by cleaning it off in his bathtub. It is clear that Coogan is neither an environmentalist nor has any time to waste on a penguin, so after his lady friend exits, he tries to release the penguin back into the wild, to no success. I must compliment the filmmakers for getting a real Magellan penguin to dutifully play the role of the loyal companion to Coogan, who, try as he might to offload the penguin, has to take it back to his apartment at St. George’s.
Naturally, the penguin is not easy to hide on campus, so Coogan eventually just brings it to class and starts using it to gain the attention of his otherwise distracted and uninterested students. He is helped in this by the activist granddaughter of the maid until she is abducted by the judicial police (the equivalent of our ICE goon squads). Along the way, we learn that Coogan had a daughter himself who was killed by a drunk driver and we piece together that this is the root cause of his personal despondency. But suddenly all of that changes. This little penguin becomes a spiritual boost for all those around him. Coogan’s colleagues are caught confiding their woes to the penguin and even the headmaster takes a shine to the penguin, who has been named Juan Salvador by the granddaughter.
The story tracks the embracing of the penguin by the student body and the entire school while Coogan tries to redeem himself by helping the maid find and secure the release of her granddaughter. Suddenly, one day, once Coogan has turned himself and his classroom around (he has become the most popular teacher on campus), he comes home to find Juan Salvador dead on the patio. There is nothing nefarious about it. The penguin just died. As his most successfully improved student points out to him, penguins mate for life and clearly Juan Salvador was not destined to live long after his mate had died in the oil spill, so we are left to feel that Juan Salvador had served his purpose on this earth and was ready to unceremoniously exit. Coogan buries Juan Salvador in the garden and during the funeral, attended by the entire school, the missing granddaughter is released in front of the school and returned to the bosom of her grandmother.
This poignant and funny story is very nicely handled by Cattaneo. Coogan is just right for the role of the irreverent Brit who becomes more caring by circumstance. This is not unlike the role Coogan played in Philomena with Dame Judi Dench, another heartwarming story worth watching. In this movie, its a penguin as the Deus Ex Machina to bring about the realization of the importance of caring about life and others. Hence the lessons that the penguin, Juan Salvador (John the Savior), gives the students, the other teachers, the headmaster and, most importantly, Coogan himself, redemption via penguin. The best lessons are taught through metaphor, as the movie tells us in less than subtle messaging. What a worthwhile story.