The Penguin Lessons

 What a penguin taught me about freedom: Libertarian themes in "𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘗𝘦𝘯𝘨𝘶𝘪𝘯 𝘓𝘦𝘴𝘴𝘰𝘯𝘴"

As Trump announces new tariffs on foreign films, time for a review of a new British blockbuster:

In the film adaptation of Tom Michell’s gentle memoir, The Penguin Lessons, a man rescues a dying penguin from an oil spill and smuggles it across South America during the prelude to Argentina's military dictatorship. His desire for a quiet life as an English teacher at a British school in Buenos Aires is challenged when a left-leaning colleague is abducted by the security services. Decades later, Argentina would elect Javier Milei—a libertarian economist who stormed to power on a promise to “chainsaw” the very bureaucracies that suffocated the country back then. In its quiet way, Michell’s story is a perfect metaphor for the values Milei now shouts from the rooftops: personal responsibility, moral clarity, and resistance to a State that too often rewards indifference and punishes individualism.

Director Peter Cattaneo (who brought us The Full Monty in 1997) successfully brings Tom Michell’s real-world memoir to life with laughs and tear-jerkers aplenty - without being overly preachy. Coogan is perfect in his role as an unorthodox English teacher abroad, combining the wit and humour of Alan Partridge with the flashes of humanity demanded by Michell's and Cattaneo's poignant storytelling.

Though a family-friendly spectacle, The Penguin Lessons deals expertly with the themes of individual responsibility and action in the face of injustice as Michell is forced to choose between a quiet life, his career and the moral imperative to defy authoritarianism.

In an era when The State claimed ever more control—over speech, education, movement, and even acts of compassion—Michell’s decision to save a helpless animal becomes more than a sentimental subplot. It’s an act of quiet rebellion. He neither asked nor waited for institutional approval, because he recognised that moral action doesn’t require bureaucratic consent. In rescuing the penguin, Michell affirms a worldview where human conscience outweighs legal obedience—a notion Libertarians know well, and one that resonates all the more in light of Argentina’s historical descent into state violence and foreign-backed repression.

If Milei is the chainsaw that wants to bring down the cathedral of statism, Tom Michell was a chisel—quietly carving a humane path through the bureaucracy of a crumbling nation. Both, in their way, remind us that liberty begins with the individual—sometimes with a penguin under your arm. Worth a watch!