MWD Thompson

This film is based on events in the 1970s when Tom Michell, teaching at St George's College, in Argentina, found one oil-drenched living penguin among many dead ones. He cleaned it and tried to return it to the sea, but the bird wouldn't leave him, so he took the penguin back to Argentina, where the bird lived with him in his school flat. The film casts Steve Coogan as Tom. Michell was in his early 20s, Coogan is considerably older, so the film creates a past for him. Argentina in the 1970 was chaotic. By 1976 inflation was running at 1000% pa. A military coup that year ousted the Péronist government and set about a reign of terror during which some 30,000 people 'disappeared' (were murdered) by the regime. In the book, Tom discusses the dark and dangerous days. The film uses dialogue and characters to describe the terror of those times and the bravery of the 'Mothers of the Disappeared'. The film shows the effect of a penguin living in a boarding school reasonably accurately. There is lots of penguin footage and the school boys act well. Some critics didn't like the feelgood penguin story combining the violence of the military who were dragging people off the streets at the time. This seems to me to be a silly criticism because those were all real events of the time. You may as well say Dr Zhivago is 'neither fish no fowl' because it depicts the carnage of the Russian revolution as the background to a complicated love story. Steve Coogan, Peter Cattaneo and Jeff Pope have done a great job of bringing to the screen the platonic love story of a penguin and the tumultuous events in Argentina at the time.