In the opening frames of Mr. Popper’s Penguins, we meet young Tom Popper, a boy waiting with unbearable anticipation to connect by short circuit radio with his explorer father. As time passes and the radio calls come farther and farther apart, Tom’s admiration for his dad begins to fade into sadness and resentment over his absence.
Flashing thirty years forward to the present day, we meet the adult Tom (Jim Carrey), a successful businessman misapplying the charisma and sense of adventure he inherited from his father to ruthless real estate development. Unlike his dad, Tom stays close to his kids—at least near enough to have them visit his gleaming penthouse apartment on alternate weekends. But his emotionally guarded heart threatens to make him as much of an absentee parent as his own father was.
We’ve seen this premise before—the likeable dad whose workaholic tendencies and stunted emotional development require a deus ex machina to rescue him (and his family) from himself. In Carrey’s own Liar, Liar, the saving grace was the dad’s sudden inability to lie. In The Santa Clause, driven toy seller Tim Allen found his heart in a Santa suit. In The Kid, Bruce Willis was all but lost (so much so that he hadn’t even managed to start a family) until confronted with his boyhood self.
What will save Mr. Popper? Cue the penguins.
The first bird arrives as an inheritance from Tom’s recently deceased father. Soon, Tom finds himself contending with a total of six Gentoo penguins. The creatures wreak plenty of slap-sticky havoc in Tom’s previously impeccable Manhattan apartment, but eventually they waddle their way into his affections by helping him reconnect with his kids and ex-wife. There are a multitude of complications, of course, including nosy neighbors, an opportunistic zoo manager, and more bird poop than any one man should have to contend with. But as Tom transforms his apartment into a winter wonderland, his heart seems to thaw even as his furniture freezes.
But will Tom’s personal transformation survive the potential loss of a key business deal? Will his enlightenment be enough to win back his wife? Can his newly vulnerable heart take it if things don’t go as planned with the penguins? And will the birds ever stop pooping at inopportune moments?
Director Mark Waters (Mean Girls, The Spiderwick Chronicles) keeps Mr. Popper hopping at an entertainingly crisp pace, making the film actually feel shorter than its trim 95 minutes. But if the economical story telling helps keep the plot moving, it undercuts the character development in unfortunate ways. We are expected to root for the resurrection of Tom’s marriage to the winsome Amanda (Spy Kids‘ Carla Gugino), but we have no idea what caused the separation in the first place. The death of Tom’s father is handled at such lightning speed that younger audience members might not grasp that it happened at all. Tom’s professional and domestic unraveling in the wake of his growing concern for the penguins flies by so quickly that it plays more like a wacky afternoon than the seismic shift it’s meant to convey. And the film’s final scenes leave out so many of the finer points that even my nine-year-old daughter (who otherwise loved the movie) felt a little gipped by the ending.
Though the script has been trimmed to the bone, the uniformly solid cast does all it can to flesh things out. Carrey is surprisingly restrained given the context, serving primarily as an empathetic straight man to the penguins and only trading is his signature physical comedy at well-timed moments. (Unfortunately, though, the source of the physical comedy is usually derived from the lowest-common-denominator; contending with the previously mentioned bird excrement and flatulence, enduring soccer balls to the groin and the head, and undergoing various other gags designed to pander to the average 8-year-old. Judging by the laughter in my screening audience, the mission was accomplished.) Gugino brings a nice warmth to the flimsily written Amanda, and Madeline Carroll and Maxwell Perry Cotton are engaging and likable as Tom and Amanda’s kids. The penguins themselves (reportedly real animals who were only minimally enhanced with CGI effects in select scenes) are undeniably cute, especially in their fixation on television footage of a waddling Charlie Chaplin.
A jewel in Mr. Popper Penguin’s crown is the casting of Angela Lansbury in the role of Mrs. Van Gundy, a property-owner Tom must impress in order to close the biggest real estate deal of his career. At 85, Lansbury is still able to effortlessly command the screen, and she lends the film a warmth and depth beyond what the script deserves.
Lansbury was 13 when Richard and Florence Atwater penned Mr. Popper’s Penguins, the classic children’s book from which the movie gets its name, and, very loosely, its premise. Fans of the book may be disappointed to see its plot so radically altered. But what the film version does retain is a refreshingly old-fashioned emphasis on family. The Popper kids are notably decent, and they don’t cross lines of respect even when they are frustrated with their parents. The entire Popper clan discovers they are strongest working together, and they do so with enough charm to keep an audience engaged even through rather formulaic fare. Mr. Popper’s Penguins may not be very deep, but it proves there’s a lot of family fun to be had in the shallow end of the pool.
Talk About It
Discussion starters- Amanda tells Tom that his daughter wants to be heard-and “felt”-more than she wants advice. Do you tend to give your family members empathy or advice when they are upset about something? What do you prefer to receive when you are struggling with a situation?
- Was it right for the Poppers to break the penguins out of the zoo? What else could they have done?
- Did you think the Poppers made the right decision regarding the penguins at the end of the movie? Why or why not?
- Why did Tom’s dad leave Tom a penguin as his inheritance? What was he trying to tell him?
The Family Corner
For parents to considerMr. Popper’s Penguins is rated PG for mild rude humor and language. The rude humor mostly involves penguin excrement and flatulence, an ongoing theme in the movie. There is some very subtle innuendo regarding a male penguin’s fertilization of penguin eggs, as well as Tom’s involvement in the “making” of his daughter, but the references are so slight it’s highly doubtful any child would detect them. There is some mild slap-sticky violence, along the lines of a soccer ball to the crotch. Although the language is generally wholesome, the characters frequently take God’s name in vain or use the acronym “OMG.”
Photos © 20th Century Fox
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