8/10 STARS - The Penguin Lessons was AMC's Screen Unseen movie for March 18 and is based on a book of the same name by Tom Michell. Tom is an English teacher who takes a job at an all-boys boarding school in Argentina just as a military coup is beginning. At the start of the coup, he travels to Uruguay and comes upon a penguin that had been caught in a oil slick and washed ashore. He cleans up the penguin and then tries his hardest to get rid of it, even going so far as to throw it back in the ocean. But all to no avail. The penguin has decided that this human is its family and thus begins the sweet friendship between penguin and man. The backdrop of the story - the coup and resulting dictatorship in Argentina - adds a level of tension, but the heart of this film is about what the main character comes to understand about himself during his time with the penguin and how that journey of self-reflection helps him deal with his pain of past loss and his fear of speaking out on behalf of those in trouble. At the end of the movie, we see a short home video clip of the real penguin during its time there at the boarding school where Tom Michell taught. This is a sweet film with some underpinnings of darker themes, but nothing explicitly violent or sexual is shown. As a comedy drama, there isn't really any "action" to speak of, but that was okay because the story moved along well, the characters were interesting, and that darn penguin deserves an acting award for making me cry! It's a movie I wouldn't have gone to see on my own but I'm glad to have been able to watch it. Recommended. Short video review to come soon.
