Learning to Stand Up to Dictators: A Review of The Penguin Lessons
- Charles Bergman
- Apr 7
- 3 min read
What did penguins ever do to Donald Trump? Why is he out for revenge on penguins? Donald Trump has slapped a 10% tariff on Heard and MacDonald Islands. Wait, what? Only penguins live there.
If you love penguins, The Penguin Lessons is a must-see movie. If you don’t yet love penguins, this movie will show you why they’re irresistible. And one of the surprising lessons penguins can teach us is how penguins can give people the strength to resist arbitrary political power.
The Penguin Lessons is laugh-out-loud funny, it’s a bit melancholy, and there are very moving moments. It will also seem frighteningly prescient of our own political moment, now in the United States.
The movie is based on the book of the same title. Though the book was published in 2015, the story takes place in 1976 in Argentina. Tom Michell is a British ex-pat just hired to teach English at a school for privileged—and spoiled—upper-crust portenos boys (the term for people from Buenos Aires). Michell is recognizable English “type.” He is a teacher: very literate, charmingly cynical, hedonistic, unable to commit to anything. Michell has taught at several schools in Latin America. He’s uprooted, transient, unconnected—"working his way south,” as he says. We will learn of a deep, unresolved grief from his past.
On a weekend getaway to Uruguay, he is walking on the beach at Punta del Este when he discovers several Magellanic Penguins washed ashore in an oil spill. One of them is alive and he rescues it, taking it to his hotel room to clean it up. Through a series of comical misadventures—like getting through Customs with a live penguin! — he returns to the classroom in Buenos Aires, now the reluctant owner of a pet penguin, which e names Juan Salvador Pinqino or “Juan Penguin the Savior.” This irresistible penguin will change the lives of Michell, his students, and even the stodgy old headmaster.
The most moving and powerful parts of the story have to do with the darkening political scene in Argentina at the time. Through Juan Salvador Penguino, Michell gets to know the family of a cleaning lady of the school. One afternoon, he watches as the politically-outspoken daughter is arrested in the streets of Buenos Aires and carried away. It’s a political kidnapping by agents of the military dictatorship. There are no charges, no rights to a trial or lawyers. She becomes one of the desaparecidos, “the disappeared”. Michell is himself tortured by his inability—his cowardice, really—to do anything as the daughter screams for help.
How this plays out, I’ll leave to you to discover. If you’ve been to Buenos Aires, you probably visited La Plaza del Mayo. Perhaps you saw the painted white handkerchiefs on the bricks. Every Thursday the mothers and grandmothers, madres y abuelas, gathered in the plaza, white bandanas on their hair, to march for the return of their sons and daughters. The daughter in the movie, and tens of thousands of desaparecidos in the country, were arrested and tortured. And many, if not most, never returned.
I actually had tears at this point in the movie, as the film evoked my own memories of seeing those madres and abuelas. I witnessed them on one of my visits to Buenos Aires in 2008. After all those years, the women still were marching for children never seen again.
Finally, let me say, it’s chilling to watch recent scenes of people being arrested on the streets by government agents, dressed in black, wearing masks, their victims simply whisked away. Not in Argentina, but in The United States, on our own evening news show. Well, it’s very troubling.
The movie’s director is Peter Cattaneo, who also directed The Full Monty.
I loved this gem of a film. The Penguin Lessons will take you to school. And it’s the penguin in the film with the biggest lessons to teach us.
All photos are copyright Charles Bergman