Penguins are funny little creatures, flapping but flightless, surfing waves and chowing down on fish. Most of us only ever get to watch them from a distance at the zoo, or on TV documentaries where their habitats are being snuffed out.
But author Tom Michell is not most of us. In the 1970s, while living in South America, 20-something Michell found himself rescuing a stubborn little Magellanic penguin coated in oil from a beach in Uruguay. He cleaned him up, named him Juan Salvador, and was forced to sneak the little guy across the border and into the British boarding school he was teaching at in Buenos Aires. Now his story is getting the Steve Coogan treatment in The Penguin Lessons, based on Michell’s 2015 memoir of the same name.
“The key difference between Tom’s book and the film is that Steve Coogan’s Tom Michell is twice the age of the young Tom Michell,” says director Peter Cattaneo. “Tom was fairly innocent. A guy in his early 20s who wanted to see Latin America, just got a job over in Buenos Aires in this school, naively going into a civil war situation. Tom Michell, played by Steve Coogan, is older. He’s cynical, he’s running away from life. He’s running away from his feelings. He’s completely disengaged in teaching.”
It’s watching a tiny penguin crack him open that gives the film its soul. BAFTA-winning actor Coogan, 59, says crotchety Tom’s cynicism and disillusionment are understandable. “People are products of their environment,” he muses. “But just the same way that you can be damaged by the people around you if they have this toxicity, the reverse is true. If you engage with people, or people are supportive or kind, that can have the reverse effect and make you more open minded and able to communicate better. And the penguin, I think, is the catalyst for that.”
Warm-hearted and uplifting, The Penguin Lessons shimmers with hope and the power of friendship, but it’s also set against the backdrop of the brutal military dictatorship that took power in Argentina in 1976; a regime that killed and disappeared thousands of people during Argentina’s Dirty War. “There are films where you can’t take them out of context,” says author Machell, now in his 70s. “Dr Zhivago without the violence and the bloodshed of the Russian Revolution, or Gone With The Wind without the American Civil War, doesn’t work any more than The Full Monty works if you take out the devastation of the steel works in Sheffield at that time. It needs that background to make it credible.”
But there were discussions, Cattaneo admits, around whether or not to include this devastating part of Argentine history in an ostensibly endearing and “very unexpected buddy comedy between a penguin and this cynical, funny Steve Coogan character”.
“Early on there was a conversation, ‘Well, do we change the time period? Do we just not deal with it?’” he remembers. “When I first started doing research, I came across disappeared denial in Argentina in certain political factions, and I was like, ‘OK, we’re not going to write it out just because it’s difficult. We’re going to tackle it.’”
Cattaneo visited Argentina and “met lots of people who’d been affected by the disappeared – it is still a very, very live issue over there” and spoke to the film’s Argentine cast about how they felt about including the material, which plays out in the storylines of the school’s housekeeper Maria, played by Argentine-Spanish actress Vivian El Jaber (Farsantes, Educando a Nina), and her granddaughter (Alfonsina Carrocio), who is disappeared.
The result is a moving yet cheering picture that is sensitive to a particular moment in time, but will also make viewers reflect on political matters today. Welsh actor Jonathan Pryce, 77, who plays Headmaster Buckle, says it’s important people are able to protest and make themselves heard. “Given the present state we’re in globally, which is a very difficult, trying time, to say the least, when you’re sitting there reading the newspapers, or looking at the TV and asking, ‘Why is every day Trump saying these extraordinary things? Why is Musk – what’s he doing? Why are there no checks on them? Why is nobody saying, ‘No, you can’t do that,’” he says. “We need to make our voices heard, definitely.”
With a film that revolves around teaching and learning vital life lessons, talk inevitably turns to the lessons the cast absorbed during the making of the movie. Slow Horses and Game Of Thrones actor Pryce, who originally trained as a teacher, says it made him think about the education system. “The [problem with the] curriculum in this country is the lack of involvement in the arts, music and theatre,” he says. “We have so much to learn from the arts, how to question things, how to ask the right questions – you learn [this] from films like The Penguin Lessons.”
“Art is what humanises us, and it can’t be measured on a spreadsheet, and that’s why, often, people don’t value it,” adds Coogan. “People forget, even Shakespeare was subsidised.”
“I learned that Steve Coogan is a genius, and that animals humanise people and make them more decent humans to each other,” says Cattaneo. “When you’re in the room with someone like a penguin, [you think] ‘I better behave well, because he’s watching me’.”
“We mustn’t forget that we’re animals as well. We’re just big, tall ones that walk around looking at iPhones,” adds Alan Partridge star Coogan with a laugh. He agrees though that a penguin can curiously tug on your sense of self and make you want to do better and be better. “The penguin appears to listen. Whether he is listening or not, he certainly does a very good impression of someone who’s listening,” he says. “Learning to listen to others, rather than just venting your own opinion, is a good thing for me to cogitate on.”
The Penguin Lessons is in cinemas Friday, April 18.
