Review: My Penguin Friend — Movies for the Rest of Us with Bill Newcott

My Penguin Friend

⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️

Rating: PG

Run Time: 1 hour 37 minutes

Stars: Jean Reno, Adriana Barraza

Writers: Kristen Lazarian, Paulina Lagudi Ulrich

Director: David Schurmann

 

From Mary Poppins to Mr. Popper, from Madagascar to Morgan Freeman’s March, the movies have always known you can’t go wrong with penguins.

My Penguin Friend, a sweet-hearted family drama based on an actual event, offers a cool breath of late-summer air; a languidly paced tale of animal adventure and human connection.

And mostly, it’s got a penguin.

Actually, make that 10 penguins, all playing the same character: A Magellanic penguin who for eight years swam thousands of miles off-course to spend the migration season not with his fellow penguins, but at the tropical seaside shack occupied by Joao Pereira de Souza, a retired Brazilian fisherman.

French star Jean Reno (The Pink Panther) plays Joao, a man whose entire life has been haunted by an awful tragedy he experienced as a young father. More than four decades later, he and his wife, Maria (Babel Oscar nominee Adriana Barraza) shuffle through their days on autopilot, keeping to themselves, finding the company of old village friends and relations too difficult to endure.

Joao’s long season of solitude, however, is shattered when, on a palm-shaded beach near his home, he finds a little oil-covered penguin, near death from starvation. Instinctively, he uses liquid dish soap to clean off the sludge and, in one of his first social encounters in years, asks some old friends for small fish to feed to his avian patient.

It’s no spoiler to relate that the arrival of the penguin — eventually named Dindim — enriches Joao’s life in ways he never dreamed of, chipping away at his self-imposed exile. When, watching his new friend flap across the bare wooden floor of his home, Joao allows himself the faintest hint of a smile, it is as if his face is breaking through a crumbling plaster wall.

For weeks, Dindim follows Joao around the house, up and down the beach, and even into town. Inevitably, as he explains the odd creature’s presence, the man has no choice but to re-engage with those he’s all but shunned for decades.

Then, one day, Dindim is gone, leaving only a sandy set of webbed footprints leading to the surf. When Reno, who has made a career playing tough guys and complicated criminals, stares at the horizon, the slightest quiver of his lip tells us all we need to know: Joao has lost his best friend.

Joao has no way of knowing, of course, that Dindim is just doing what a migratory penguin does. He dutifully returns to his nesting place near the southern tip of South America — where a team of naturalists takes note of his unusual friendliness with humans. They tag him and resolve to keep an eye on this most curious penguin — who, come the next migration season, once again peels off to visit his human friend in the Brazilian tropics.

My Penguin Friend struggles a bit when it comes to matching the parallel narratives occurring thousands of miles distant from each other: at Joao’s home and at the penguin breeding grounds. The film cuts back and forth between them as if things are occurring simultaneously, when the realities of geography dictate that the events must have happened weeks, and even months, apart.

It is, I suppose, an attempt to inject some suspense into the proceedings as, unbeknownst to Joao, the scientists consider capturing Dindim for study, ending his migration days forever. But the stakes never seem all that high; Dindim has found his way to Joao’s beach before, and we have every confidence this film will return him there, safe and sound.

My Penguin Friend never goes so far as to suggest Dindim in any way fills the hole that has inflicted Joao’s heart for most of his life — such pat resolutions are of no interest to Brazilian director David Schurmann and co-writers Kristen Lazarian and Paulina Lagudi Ulrich. Indeed, when a reminder of that long-ago loss emerges late in the film, it’s clear that Joao and his wife still have much healing to do.

That faithful representation of the persistence of trauma may make My Penguin Friend a bit too intense for very young children who would otherwise be enthralled by the adventures of an adorable penguin and the man who loves him. The loss Joao and Maria suffer at the outset sets a devastatingly tragic tone, and the smallest audience members may spend the rest of the film focusing on that, rather than on the tale of emotional emergence that follows.

Then again, there’s the penguin’s waddle. And that cute little squawk. And the way he flaps his flipper-like wings.

Yeah. I feel better already.