Penguin “Dramedy” Never Takes Flight

1 star

Steve Coogan deserves better. So does the penguin.

Being sold as a “poignant dramedy”, whatever that means, The Penguin Lessons tells the story of a damaged soul named Englishman Tom Michell (Steve Coogan) stumbling around South America from teaching job to teaching job in a haze of personal grief from the death of his daughter. When his latest school, a private academy for rich boys in Argentina, is closed for a week following a military coup, Michell goes off on a seaside vacation to get drunk and meet women. Instead, he reluctantly rescues a penguin trapped in an oil slick.

What follows is predictable but still messy. About a third of the movie is taken up with scenes of the penguin interacting with the students and faculty, and another third is with scenes of the penguin breaking through Coogan’s protective shell to help him rediscover the man he was. The final third is scenes of the military coup and the impact it had on the people of Argentina, especially the thousand who disappeared, never to be seen again. None fit together well enough to be either poignant or a dramedy.

A considerable part of the problem is the title character, the penguin. Cute as they may be in real life or documentaries, penguins are wild animals who can’t be trained to act. So, all director Peter Cattaneo can do is film the flightless bird and edit what he gets into the film as reaction shots. It works for a while, but quickly becomes clumsy despite all the actors’ efforts to make it feel real.

Coogan bears the burden of making the penguin believable; talented as he is, it’s too big a task for the Oscar-nominated actor. He’s excellent in the dramatic part of the ‘dramedy,” especially in the scenes showing Michell’s gradual thawing towards other people. It’s in the comedy that Coogan falls flat. He has some great lines, but there is hesitation in his delivery that kills the humor almost before it gets out of his mouth, as if he adlibbed the line and is waiting for the director to say cut. Maybe insert a shot of the penguin laughing.