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 \u2014 but it helps to have an irrepressibly characterful foil. In Stephen Frears\u2019s Philomena, it was Judi Dench, now it\u2019s a small penguin. In The Penguin Lessons, Coogan plays Tom Michell, a jaded English teacher who arrives at an exclusive boys\u2019 school in Argentina in 1976, just before the country\u2019s military coup d\u2019\u00e9tat. 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\u2019s 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\u2019s more than a little formulaic too: Coogan\u2019s 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\u2019s political reality.Director Peter Cattaneo (The Full Monty, Military Wives) has it made as far as Coogan\u2019s palmiped co-star is involved: throw in a few quizzical beak-raised reaction shots and you can\u2019t 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\u2019t gel. And once the narrative engages with the brutalities of Argentina\u2019s military regime and the fates of its disappeared, it becomes clear that this glib offering is way out of its depth.\u2605\u2605\u2606\u2606\u2606In UK cinemas from April 18 and US cinemas now<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 \u2014 but it helps to have an irrepressibly<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":279847,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-279846","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279846","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=279846"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279846\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":279848,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279846\/revisions\/279848"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/279847"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=279846"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=279846"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=279846"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}