Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.Steve Coogan is pretty reliable when it comes to playing world-weary characters whose passion is revived by a cause — but it helps to have an irrepressibly characterful foil. In Stephen Frears’s Philomena, it was Judi Dench, now it’s a small penguin. In The Penguin Lessons, Coogan plays Tom Michell, a jaded English teacher who arrives at an exclusive boys’ school in Argentina in 1976, just before the country’s military coup d’état. Initially inclined to keep his head down, his conscience is awakened by a penguin that he reluctantly saves from an oil spill. He ends up taking in the bird as a long-term house guest and it proves an indispensable teaching aid, helping to shake up the blinkered worldview of his arrogant pupils and turn them on to the glories of Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Masefield.Based on Tom Michell’s memoir, and scripted by Philomena and The Lost King writer Jeff Pope, The Penguin Lessons exudes a stale, fishy whiff of Dead Poets Society. It’s more than a little formulaic too: Coogan’s Michell, a walking streak of sarcasm in caramel corduroy, proves to have a poignant back-story that both explains his cynicism and motivates his eventual awakening to Argentina’s political reality.Director Peter Cattaneo (The Full Monty, Military Wives) has it made as far as Coogan’s palmiped co-star is involved: throw in a few quizzical beak-raised reaction shots and you can’t fail. But the combination of farce, stark political reality and a shameless ahh factor is decidedly awkward.Jonathan Pryce and Argentine actress Vivian El Jaber bring some vim to paper-thin supporting roles, but Coogan seems uncharacteristically listless, as if only too aware that the mix doesn’t gel. And once the narrative engages with the brutalities of Argentina’s military regime and the fates of its disappeared, it becomes clear that this glib offering is way out of its depth.★★☆☆☆In UK cinemas from April 18 and US cinemas now
