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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…"

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