‘The Penguin Lessons’ is a far more poignant and serious film than its trailer would suggest, which gives us Steve Coogan in 1970s Argentina being followed by a penguin which he unofficially adopts and hides in the elite private school where he teaches English. The film itself has more than a touch of ‘Dead Poets Society’ to it in the way it gives us Tom Michell (Coogan) who inadvertently challenges the orthodoxy and conservatism at the institution which abides by set rules and traditional precepts while all around Buenos Aires is beset by chaos with the coup d’état that brings about forced disappearances, including that of one of the auxiliary staff based at the school.

Michell is a three dimensional figure who is carrying a trauma of his own which led him to leave his native England and take teaching positions at schools across South America, and his encounter with a penguin whose life he saves from an oil slick while out on a weekend excursion to Uruguay where he was trying to impress a woman… ends up with him going home with the penguin instead. There are moments of great humour as we see a deadpan Coogan reluctantly stuffing the bird in his suitcase or coat and trying to get through customs.

Wherever he goes, the penguin follows, but when he starts to speak to the bird as if he is in a confessional – and when the stuffy headmaster (a scene-stealing Jonathan Pryce) does the same – it is clear that we are into sentimental territory. This is Peter Cattaneo’s best film since he was Oscar-nominated for ‘The Full Monty’ over a quarter of a century earlier, and it has the same spirit of finding unexpected means to escape from a dreary, soulless existence. Michell even resorts to teaching revolutionary-charged anti-war poetry to capture the attention of his (no longer unruly) pupils and in so doing the pupils and Michell himself start to see the transformative potential of education, even if the school authorities are somewhat slower to appreciate the change of tack.

The penguin becomes an educational tool (a classroom assistant, quite literally) and an agent of therapy and renewal, although ultimately the film gives us the backdrop of political upheaval and murders as a reductionistic device for turning Michell into a better man and for the cloistered school community to become more enlightened. What we have at the end of the day is a feelgood movie set against the backdrop of torture and oppression, and this may not work for all audiences, but it is an extremely heartwarming and well-played effort.