Stay informed of free updates
Just register at Movie Myft Digest – Delivered directly in your reception box.
Steve Coogan is quite reliable when it comes to playing weary characters in the world whose passion is revived by a cause – but that helps to have an irrepressible character. In Stephen Frears PhilomèneIt was Judi Dench, now it's a little penguin. In Penguin lessonsCoogan plays Tom Michell, a jaded English teacher who arrived in an exclusive boys' school in Argentina in 1976, just before the country's military coup.
Initially inclined to keep his head down, his conscience is awakened by a penguin which he reluctantly saves from an oil spill. He ends up absorbing the bird as a long -term investment of the house and this is an essential educational help, helping to shake the vision of the world flashed of his arrogant students and activate them to the glories of Percy bysshe Shelley and John Masefield.
Based on the Memoirs of Tom Michell, and scripted by Philomène And The lost king writer Jeff Pope, Penguin lessons gives off a stunned orientation and fish from Society of dead poets. It is also more than a little formula: Michell de Coogan, a sequence of sarcasm sarcasm in the caramel curtain, turns out to have a poignant story which explains both its cynicism and motivates its possible awakening to the political reality of Argentina.
Director Peter Cattaneo (The complete monty,, Military wives) did it until Coogan's co-star Palmiped is involved: throw a few reaction high by the beak and you cannot fail. But the combination of farce, austere political reality and a shameless Ahh factor is decidedly embarrassing.
Jonathan Pryce and the Argentinian actress Vivian El Jaber bring roles in support of paper, but Coogan seems useless, as if it was only too aware that the mixture did not gelify. And once the story is committed to the brutality of the military regime of Argentina and the fate of its disappearance, it becomes clear that this Glib offer is far from its depth.
★★ ☆ From
In British cinemas of April 18 and American cinemas now
