MY PENGUIN FRIEND - Mark Reviews Movies

My Penguin Friend, Roadside Attractions

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 15, 2024

There is almost certainly a heart-warming movie to be made from the true story behind My Penguin Friend, but this particular movie isn't it. All the pieces are in place, starting with the real-life tale of an older man who cared for an injured penguin and kept being visited by it each year. There's some footage of that man and his penguin pal at the very end of director David Schurmann's movie, and those brief glimpses of the joyful man and his feathered companion carry more emotional heft than anything in the dramatized version preceding them.

For one thing, Kristen Lazarian and Paulina Lagudi Ulrich's screenplay attempts to force too much of an emotional reaction from this tale from the start. We meet a family of three living on an island off the coast of Rio de Janeiro, where the husband/father fishes, the wife/mother keeps up their seaside home, and the son is so innocent, eager, and shot in such a fleeting way that we know he can't be long for this story. That might sound cruel, but if it's any consolation, be aware that the death of the protagonist's son is an invention on the part of the filmmakers. Who's the callous one now?

Decades after his son drowns during a storm when he and the boy go out on a boat, João (Jean Reno) lives a mostly isolated and quiet life with his wife Maria (Adriana Barraza). Schurmann seems to have given Reno one note about his performance: always look as if João is on the verge of tears. The actor pulls that off, for sure, even when he's content or thrilled to be accompanied by a cute penguin, and the international star's weary and mournful visage certainly encapsulates a man trapped in a state of grief he appears unlikely to ever shake.

That's enough about the sad stuff, because there's still the penguin to sort of lift everyone's spirits. It's a real one (or several performing as the movie's real star) for the most part, except when the filmmakers need to show the bird darting about the water or in some kind of peril. Considering how shallow the human characters are and how much effort Schurmann puts into giving us the penguin's perspective (a literal bird's-eye view at times), one wonders what this story might have been like told entirely from the bird's point of view, in which the humans are simply the background players they essentially amount to in this version.

The penguin heads out on its own, becomes covered in spilled oil, and winds up washed ashore by João's home. The man feeds it small fish, cleans it repeatedly, and even fashions a little sweater for the penguin out of his dead son's stocking hat.

The whole point, obviously, is that João is somehow atoning for the death of his son, and if that maudlin thought isn't enough, there are moments here in which the filmmakers go so far as to suggest that Dindim, as the daughter of the son's childhood friend names the bird, possesses some spiritual connection to the deceased child. It hears the son's voice while waddling through the forest and even collects a birthday gift the boy never opened to add to the nest João builds for it.

Why can't the penguin just be a penguin? Why can't the older man simply find the idea of caring for a creature to be worthwhile for its own sake? Why do the filmmakers insist on adding so many elements of despair and suspense into such a decidedly innocent and happily easy tale? Such are the questions presented by this schmaltzy movie, which possesses such a lovely and pure-hearted conceit at its core. The footage of the real man and the penguin at the end of the movie prove that argument, and it's as if the makers of this dramatization go out of their way to overburden the story with pathos and complications it doesn't require.

The best moments are simplistic: João washing Dindim, Dindim cuddling on a blanket covering João's lap, the man missing the bird when it finally leaves to return to its home some 5,000 miles away, and the joyous surprise when the penguin returns for more fish from and snuggling with its human friend. In those little moments, it almost feels mean to criticize the movie, but then, there's the matter of everything surrounding those bits.

Dindim becomes a local celebrity, gets into some minor and inconsequential trouble around town, and, when a team of researchers (played by Alexia Moyano, Nicolás Francella, and Rocío Hernandez) in the penguin's Patagonian home tag the bird and realize its annual trek, is caught in the middle of a debate about what to do with the penguin. All of this unfolds over the span of years, apparently, but the movie is so set on establishing all of the real or potential disasters surrounding it that the central relationship feels like a brief interlude amidst the rest of the plot.

A documentary treatment likely would have served this story better. That's a cheap observation, of course, but that's fitting for the melodramatic and rushed approach of My Penguin Friend, which cheapens what seems to be a wholly pleasant tale.

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