Book Vs. Movie: Mr. Popper's Penguins
By Russ Bickerstaff
June 22, 2011
BoxOfficeProphets.com
In this corner: the Book. A collection of words that represent ideas when filtered through the lexical systems in a human brain. From clay tablets to bound collections of wood pulp to units of stored data, the book has been around in one format or another for some 3,800 years.
And in this corner: the Movie. A 112-year-old kid born in France to a guy named Lumiere and raised primarily in Hollywood by his uncle Charlie "the Tramp" Chaplin. This young upstart has quickly made a huge impact on society, rapidly becoming the most financially lucrative form of storytelling in the modern world.
Both square off in the ring again as Box Office Prophets presents another round of Book vs. Movie.
Mr. Popper’s Penguins
Richard Atwater taught Greek at the University of Chicago in the early 20th century. He worked as a journalist in Chicago. In the 1930s when there was a far bigger market for print journalism, Atwater had made the rounds writing for the Chicago Evening Post, the Chicago Daily News, the Chicago Tribune, and the Herald-Examiner. In his spare time he wrote fiction. It’s safe to say that the vast majority of the words the man wrote have been completely forgotten. The reason Atwater is remembered at all is due to a work that he had written with his wife Florence. Inspired by an old documentary about Admiral Byrd’s trip to the Antarctic, Richard and Florence worked on a children’s book called, Ork! The Story of Mr. Popper's Penguins. Richard suffered from a pulmonary embolism in 1934 which left him unable to peak or write, so his wife edited the book and had it published. Over 70 years after the book was published, it is considered to be one of the great classics of U.S. kids' fiction. It’s now been adapted into a family movie that 20th Century Fox releases in a June positively crowded with big-budget major releases. Can the film make any kind of a lasting impression that will match the longevity of the classic children’s book?
The Book
In an era that has survived March of the Penguins, Happy Feet and countless hours of footage of penguins on every kind of screen imaginable, it’s a bit difficult to empathize with an era where moving images of penguins, whether at the movies or at the zoo, were actually kind of difficult to come by. In the 1930s, penguins would’ve been a much more novel species to anyone not living in the Antarctic. The Atwater’s fascination with the birds would’ve been easy to understand. The novelty may be gone, but the fiction remains fresh in kind of a surreal 1930s children’s story kind of way.
Mr. Popper is a house painter who supports his wife by painting houses. Just a few years after the Wall Street Crash of 1929, the story is quite firmly planted in the Great Depression. Monetary concerns pop up at an alarming rate for a children’s book. An educated man who is also an avid reader unable to get any work other than that of a house painter was probably pretty common back then.
Popper, who is fascinated with expeditions to far off places, has written a letter to Admiral Drake, who is exploring Antarctica. On a broadcast, Drake says hello to Popper and tells him that there is a surprise coming his way. As house painting season has come to an end, Popper can do little but wonder what the surprise might be. Naturally, it’s a penguin.
That the penguin is sent by a standard courier in a big wooden crate kind of stretches credibility, even if it’s exactly how such a thing would be shipped. The story gets a little surreal from there. The concept of an out of work house painter hanging out with an exotic pet in a simple, suburban home is quaint and enjoyable. The plot arc is pretty basic. The penguin is evidently quite lonely. Mr. Popper writes a letter to the curator of a large aquarium to ask him for advice. The curator then sends him another penguin - one that had seemed inconsolable.
With two penguins together, the pair mate and before long there’s a huge family that strains the budget of an out of work housepainter. The penguins are enlisted to help out by forming a vaudeville-style performing penguins act. In an era without You Tube, live performing penguins become a huge hit. Popper is contacted by a man involved in the fledgling 1930s film industry. He wants to make penguin movies. Just as Popper is considering this offer he gets contacted by Admiral Drake, who wants to bring the penguins to the Arctic Circle, giving Popper an important decision to make.
It’s not difficult to imagine the story capturing the imaginations of kids during the Great Depression, World War II and so on, but the story loses some of its impact with the proliferation of TV nature programs that would’ve allowed even those not able to regularly visit a world-class zoo or public aquarium to see a more realistic portrayal of the real thing.
The story arc of the book isn’t terribly well-constructed and aside from a slightly larger vocabulary than one might find in most children’s fare, the prose style itself is actually kind of weak. The appeal here is definitely the penguins, though they are never described in great detail. If there is a kind of genius in the text of the book, it’s the fact that it delivers just enough description to capture the imagination without delivering so much that it hampers enjoyment of the story. The book got to be the classic it is by presenting cute, exotic birds in a suburban domestic setting and standing far enough back to let the reader think about all of the strange possibilities of penguins being treated as pets. There may not be much to it, but the simple, iconic feel of the story has been strong enough to carry it through several decades of popularity.
The Movie
The film makes no attempt to reach out to the Depression-era setting of the original book. In many respects, the basic plot of the film is diametrically opposed to that of the book. An aging, rubbery Jim Carrey stars as Popper. The elastic face of Carrey may be showing a few more wrinkles than it has in the past, but there isn’t the overall sense of financial stress found in the book’s Popper. The film’s Popper is no pauper. Far from being an impoverished house painter, this Popper is a high-powered real estate broker who lives in a rather nicely furnished modern apartment in Manhattan.
Carey’s Popper isn’t married either - divorced, actually. This is actually kind of a clever trade-off. The character’s charm in the book lies largely in the fact that he is struggling financially but seems more interested in reading about far-away expeditions than obsessing over his own problems. In the film, Popper’s charm comes from the fact that his relationship with his wife and family isn’t going that well. He wants to get back together with them and we feel for him. Having successfully toned-down his annoying spastic comedy shtick, Carey delivers the charm pretty well. He’s only mildly annoying here. That being said, he lacks the ample charm of the character in the book.
In absence of an interest in the Antarctic, the film’s Popper receives his first penguin thanks to the will of his late father - a world traveler who never really had a chance to spend much time with Popper as he was growing-up. The high-tech nature of the crate the penguin arrives in allows the mail-order penguin thing to seem a little bit more believable. The penguin appears to have been delivered in a state of suspended animation, which is actually kind of a cool effect, even if it doesn’t really make any sense.
In calling to attempt to get the penguin returned to his late father’s ship, there’s something of a mix-up and he ends up getting a shipment of a few more penguins. At that stage, the film begins to resemble to book less and less. The penguins stand between the two ends of Popper’s life. On the one hand, he’s trying to buy the ultra-impossible-to-purchase Tavern on the Green restaurant. On the other end of things, he’s trying to get back in touch with his family. The two are at odds with each other and the penguins are somewhere in the middle of it all. With his kids so completely in love with the penguins, his initial desire to get rid of them changes. The zoologist who he contacted to try to take them away becomes a weakly comic villain. Of course, making the zoologist the villain of the film keeps its heart solidly removed from that of the book. The plot of the film values the importance of human connection—family connection and suchlike. The book has its heart firmly entrenched in a love of nature.
The family-centric theme of the film would be a lot more convincing if the human end of the film was at least marginally convincing. Yes, Carrey is only mildly annoying here, but the whole family dynamic plays out in a kind of desperation that never quite feels convincing enough to be real. The single most genuine-feeling emotional moment of the film isn’t human, though - it is entirely fabricated. It’s less than a minute’s worth of film, but there’s a point where Popper is on the couch watching a nature program, mulling over what to do with the penguin he has just received. The penguin in question is watching the show. There’s a tender moment there where there’s a bird in flight seen on the TV screen. The penguin looks down at her wings, raises and lowers them, and then looks back up at the footage of the bird in flight longingly. There’s real subtlety here that’s really quite touching. And the beauty of the subtlety of watching a semi-anthropomorphized penguin longing to fly is brilliantly executed. That moment and the penguin’s love of Chaplin films are the only couple of moments where the film really manages to bring across some of the charm the penguins possess in the book.
The Verdict
The book came at a time before penguins had become commonplace in popular culture. They were a novelty, which allowed the book a kind of charming novelty not capable in an era where penguins have already been the subject of a couple of wildly successful films. The film adaptation actually does a pretty good job of finding a level of realism somewhere between March of the Penguins and Happy Feet, but the novelty just isn’t there. And in a summer overpopulated by kid’s films, it’s not going to be remembered all that well. It is likely to break even on production budget, but opening the same week as a huge, corporate kids' superhero marketing piece and just before the massive machinery of a huge Disney/Pixar sequel, any hopes of success beyond that simply are NOT realistic. The book is likely to maintain a kind of timelessness that will see the film being kind of an odd footnote to the book’s longevity. In ten years, one imagines someone reading the book to their kids and saying, "you know, they made a movie based on this book a long time ago…"