Review: Mr. Popper's Penguins (2011)

Mr. Popper’s Penguins is an okay Jim Carrey family comedy, but it bears little resemblance to the classic children’s book by Richard and Florence Atwater, lacking in particular its cozy charms. First published in 1938, with gorgeous black-and-white illustrations by Robert Lawson, the book tells the story of Mr. Popper, an eccentric house painter in a small town, who spends his winter months out of work, reading and dreaming about exploration of the North and South Poles. One day, his occasional correspondent, the Antarctic explorer Admiral Drake, sends him a penguin in a packing crate, and, with the help of a female from a zoo (who rescues “Captain Cook” from his morbid loneliness), the two penguins soon become twelve. In the course of raising and training the penguins, the humble Popper family rises to show business fame and fortune. Ultimately, it all proves too much for the family and the little birds, and it’s decided they need calmer and cooler climes.

The movie’s screenplay shows little interest in the classic children’s book, let alone affection for it. Instead, the screenwriters—Sean Anders, John Morris, and Jared Stern—simply extract the basic concept of a man raising penguins in his home and fit it into a standard, out-of-the-box 21st-century family movie. Coming out in 2011, the same year as Happy Feet Two, Mr. Popper’s Penguins also acts as a last extension on the coattails of 2005’s unforeseen success, March of the Penguins, which launched a penguin fad in the 2000s. Lastly, the film also functions as a typical Jim Carrey family movie. The movie is basically Liar Liar (1997) with penguins.

All the emotion in the movie version of Mr. Popper’s Penguins is pure paint-by-numbers. In early, treacly flashbacks, we learn that the father of our protagonist, Thomas Popper Jr (played by Jim Carrey), was an explorer who didn’t spend enough time with his kid. As a result, Tom grows up to be a not-very-nice man in a business suit with career success and not much else. Will Tom be reunited with his estranged wife (Carla Gugino) and kids (Madeline Carrol and Maxwell Perry Cotton)? Will he win over the rich old lady (Angela Lansbury) in order to land his big real estate deal? You know the answers. Popper learns to lighten up and have some fun and connect with his family, like in every family movie ever. He also learns there is more to life than real estate deals and a nice penthouse.

The funny thing about the recurrent lesson in these sorts of family movies that career success isn’t everything is that Hollywood is also, especially in the past couple decades, generally uncomfortable with depicting families who have basic, realistic money issues. The Simpsons, in early seasons of the show, are the last pop culture family I can recall that expressed concern about their weekly budgets. 

The penguins in Mr. Popper’s Penguins are mostly present for slapstick fun, and at times are used for sidekick animal humour, such as projectile bird poo. Fortunately, there are also the more palatable charms of the penguins enjoying watching Charlie Chaplin movies, as well as a few ideas lifted from the pages of the Atwater book, such as opening the windows of your home in the winter to make an indoor winter wonderland for the cold-weather birds. The film’s interest in penguins, however, and how you might conceivably care for them, is only a secondary interest, whereas one of the book’s main pleasures is the idea of taking a small house and figuring out how you would remake it to become a penguin preserve. It could really be any troop of animals in the movie—Mr. Popper’s Pigs/Parrots/Porcupines/Etc.—and it would be essentially the same story. Whereas the book shares Popper’s love for “those cold regions at the top and bottom of the earth” and their inhabitants. 

In the movie, in spite of Popper’s dad having been an explorer, there is little longing for exploration, for the allure of the Arctic and Antarctic, places Mr. Popper in the book so enjoys reading about, in the evening with his pipe in his living room during the long winter months. Early on in the book, the Atwaters describe Mr. Popper thus:

The reason Mr. Popper was so absent-minded was that he was always dreaming about far-away countries. He had never been out of Stillwater. Not that he was unhappy. He had a nice little house of his own, a wife whom he loved dearly, and two children, named Janie and Bill. Still, it would have been nice, he often thought, if he could have seen something of the world.

The Atwaters have, in simple prose for children, tapped into true, deep human feeling. The contrast, you see, is between a movie that merely wants to entertain, to take your attention for an (admittedly wonderfully crisp) hour and a half, versus a children’s book that wants to connect you with a family of humans and birds and, most importantly, to evoke certain feelings and associations somewhere deep down inside you. There is nothing deep anywhere in the movie Mr. Popper’s Penguins, whereas the book is gentle, silly, and sometimes poignant.

Okay, okay, so this is just another movie that doesn’t live up to the book in the mind of one passionate reader, you might reply. Fair enough. But let’s say you never liked the book—or never read it. Well, this movie is competent if devoid of authentic charm, beyond the personality of Jim Carrey that is. Jim Carrey, after all, is Jim Carrey, and he makes some funny faces and inserts a few good gags. The narrative arc works. It’s functional. In this way, Mr. Popper’s Penguins is an example of Hollywood’s typical approach to adaptation, going all the way back to the 1920s and 30s. The strategy is to fall back on competent, efficient, if mediocre storytelling, by conforming each story to the current successful patterns, whereas, in my view, the best adaptations try to translate the spirit of the original work into a new form. Sadly, the spirit of the book does not reside anywhere in this movie version.

4 out of 10

Mr. Popper’s Penguins (2011, USA)

Directed by Mark Waters; screenplay by Sean Anders, John Morris, and Jared Stern, based on the book by Richard and Florence Atwater; starring Jim Carrey, Carla Gugino, Madeline Carrol, Maxwell Perry Cotton, and Angela Lansbury.

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