The Penguin Lessons review - Steve Coogan and his flippered friend

As if penguins didn’t have enough to fret about with impending tariffs on exporting guano to America, here comes Steve Coogan to ruffle their feathers. The Penguin Lessons is a pretty loose adaptation of a memoir by Tom Michell, about his stint as a young English teacher in an ersatz British boarding school in Argentina.

Casting middle-aged Coogan as Michell meant giving him a cursory backstory of a personal family tragedy to explain why his alternately louche and curmudgeonly character has sought employment abroad. Set against the backdrop of the 1976 military coup that led to the murders and imprisonment of thousands of left-wing citizens, Peter Cattaneo's film asks how can a cynical lost soul be humanised? The answer is by inspiring teenage boys with a love of learning. Feed Goodbye Mr Chips, Dead Poets Society, The Browning Version, The History Boys, and The Holdovers into your AI-scriptwriting programme of choice, add in a twist of Insta-friendly animal, and you’ve got The Penguin Lessons. It's one of those simulacrum films that could have sprung from an algorithm.

Coogan plays the floppy-haired, suede shoe-wearing English master imported to raise the boys’ language skills from hopeless to acceptable. Michell also reluctantly coaches the lads in rugby, a game he's never played. Jonathan Pryce phones in his performance as the dapper head-teacher trying to maintain Etonian standards on the outskirts of Buenos Aires while the army round up dissident Argentinians and bombs explode.

Paper planes fly in the classroom, drawing pins are left on seats, and plump boys are bullied to Michell's faint disapproval. When he’s befriended by an alcoholic Finnish physics teacher and the school is briefly closed during the coup, the two go on a jaunt to neighbouring Uruguay. (Pictured below: Steve Coogan as Tom Michell with his invaluable teaching aid)

There’s a nightclub scene where Michell dances with an attractive woman that seems to be in the film solely for Coogan to show off his moves and allay any anxiety that his character may be more into schoolboys than ladies.

While on the same holiday in Punta del Este, Michell stumbles across a colony of penguins smothered in spilled oil on the beach. One of them is still alive, and he rescues the penguin, tenderly cleans it up, and smuggles it back to the school in Argentina.

Named Juan Salvador (the Spanish title for cult novel Jonathan Livingstone Seagull), the penguin rapidly becomes an emotional rescue pet, a bridge between misanthropic teacher and recalcitrant students and a rich source of amusing incidents. Played alternately by a pair of Magellan penguins, Juan Salvador is a charmer, up there with the stars of Happy Feet and March of the Penguins.

And judging by the enthusiasm Michell’s class start to show for the poetry of John Masefield and Percy Bysshe Shelley, the adorable bird is a helpful adjunct to teaching the finer points of the English language. (That’s a lot more than can be said for the infinitely funnier and more inventive Pingu who I’m still blaming for my then-toddler son’s conviction that he didn’t need to learn English but could just squawk and whirr in Pinglish to get his point across.)

Those wanting to learn more about the enduring national trauma of the Argentinians who disappeared will have to look elsewhere for any in-depth history of that bleak time in the country's history. Scraps of archive and clunky expository dialogue is all you'll find here. But as a gentle comedy for Coogan fans who don't mind watching a film with a complete lack of originality, The Penguin Lessons might be acceptable enough.

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