Argentina’s 1970s Dirty War gets dirtier just days after Tom Michell (Steve Coogan) arrives to teach English at an elite “prepa,” populated by the curried sons and daughters of the ruling junta. He assumes that Argentina is a safe place for an Englishman, but instead comes face to face with police-state scoundrels responsible for disappearing (a gerund that replaced the verb phrase “made disappear”) suspected communists. He finds that his classroom is a microcosm of the State. He steps into the role of that hapless teacher whose students have no respect for anyone, and he is no exception. Michell focuses on Diego, a student subjected to bullying by a classmate home-schooled in anticommunism. He elevates Diego’s self-worth by introducing the class to poetry. When Diego can identify a metaphor in a Shelley poem or a John Masefield paen to the sea, his stock rises in direct proportion to his Anglo’d eloquence.
After a madrugada of carousing in neighboring Uruguay ends with none of the affection Michell hopes for, a beachcombing penguin insinuates itself into Michell’s provisional existence. The penguin is unsparing in his affection. The word for “pet” in Spanish is mascoto. Unsuccessful at distancing the caring penguin, Michell drafts him as mascot for both the English class he teaches and the Rugby team he reluctantly coaches. That English false cognate for mascoto slides like the Balm of Gilead into the wounding misalliances that pass for Michell’s life. In short order, the mascoto extends his dominion to bring his instincts to bear on Michell’s mounting troubles. It’s not that Michell doesn’t have a backstory of his own tucked under his failures to launch, empathize, or fully engage. He is, as it turns out, a far cry from the politically aware but socially feckless turista, who in the ‘70s, traipsed around Latin America in cutoffs and sandals (in Nicaragua, they called them “Sandalistas”), hoping to channel Che Guevara.
Given that life under the junta is like life everywhere—you ride the bus, you shop at the market—until it isn’t, the moment the terror comes after someone you admire, when you must suddenly take inventory, arrives unannounced. When the housekeeper’s granddaughter, who has shown Tom how to care for the penguin, is kidnapped, he concludes that it is time to “pull up his socks” and act.
Critics who complain that The Penguin Lessons is predictable must take into account that it is based on a real-life story. What happened, happened, predictable or not. Coogan has been cast as he was in “Happyish,” as the bloke with a roving eye for the underbelly of things. When the moment comes to shift gears, he shows himself how to sequence the pedals. The penguin has made that possible. The penguin has realigned values at the prepa.
As Michell’s housekeeper, Vivian El Jaber turns in a performance that blossoms with the story. She explains that her whole family will forever live in the same house that has been built out of stolen materials because they are poor; that they are the mirror image of the wealthy families who inhabit their homes generation after generation because they are rich. The photography picks up on the jolie-laide contradiction that stuns in South America. It’s a continent where the natural beauty of land and sea and the horror of a history scarred by brutal dictatorships compete for attention and access to whichever stock carries weight in your inventory.
