Movie reviews: Hollywood and Indie, specializing in independent comedies, dramas, thrillers and romance.
Monday, December 22, 2025
The Penguin Lessons: Movie Review
A quietly powerful tale about facing fascism with a penguin by your side.
Set in 1976 in Argentina, The Penguin Lessons is indeed about a penguin, but quietly and also subtly, it’s also about living within a dictatorship. Tom (Steve Coogan) is an English teacher originally from Britain but in recent years has been working in South America. He arrives at St. George’s in Buenos Aires with armed guards pointing their guns at him, so it’s easy to see why they would be desperate for teachers.
2024
Directed by: Peter Cattaneo
Based on the book by Tom Michell
Screenplay by: Jeff Pope
Starring: Steve Coogan
Tom has learned how to keep his mouth shut and no longer cares about the world around him. Here at St. George’s, a private school for rich, privileged boys, they specifically want teachers who will not mention politics as if poetry and classic novels are famously anti-political. Tom is fine with that because he’s also intending on not really teaching. He shows up to class, lectures about literary devices while the kids bully one another; they ignore him, and he ignores them.
Meanwhile Argentina is just at the beginning of their military dictatorship. In March 1976, their president was killed and overthrown by a coup, the military took over and is kidnapping anybody who seems sympathetic to the previous, left-leaning regime. Tom is happy to ignore all of this and in an effort to win over a woman he was partying with in Uruguay, picks up a penguin washed up on the beach in an oil spill and proceeds to clean it and tries to return it to the ocean. After many humorous situations, Tom is now importing a smuggled penguin into militarized Argentina.
This movie is primarily a comedy. But while Tom is hiding the penguin, and trying to feed the penguin, and trying to convince a zoo to take the penguin without revealing how it came to be in his possession, he’s also seeing first-hand how the dictatorship is destroying Argentinian families he has come to care about.
With a penguin by his side, Tom now has to figure out how to stick up for what is right without losing his job. It’s not his fault if Percy Bysshe Shelley snuck some not-so-coded political ideologies into his poetry. It’s generally understood that you don’t keep large, flightless birds in your dormitory, but it’s not technically a rule, so Juan Salvador, the penguin named after the Spanish translation of Jonathan Livingston Seagull (a metaphorical novel about breaking away from societal norms), might just get to stay.
On its surface, The Penguin Lessons is about a new vision and purpose that an abandoned penguin brings to an English teacher and his students. But how the movie incorporates the Argentinian military dictatorship, it becomes a quietly powerful tale about not staying silent while faced with fascism, and how Tom had buried all these facets of himself just to not be uncomfortable. But what better way to tell that story than with an adorable, funny penguin, so ultimately you have a tale that is affecting but also funny and uplifting and real (this is based on a true story after all).
