10 DECEMBER 2005, Page 44

Pillars of the community

Mark Steyn

March of the Penguins U, selected cinemas March of the Penguins, a documentary film about penguins on the march, was a smash hit in America, and as such became one of those cultural artefacts instantly seized on as proof of whatever one wants to prove. Some of my friends on the Right advanced the penguins as exemplars of conservative family values; others on the Left replied that they’re the same family values as conservative congressmen — the male penguin trades his female in for a new model every season — and the ones that aren’t serially monogamous are apparently gay, as Silo and Roy, the penguins at the Central Park Zoo, are reported to be. Not sure where British libel law stands on penguins, but perhaps I should throw an ‘allegedly’ in there, just in case Silo and Roy, like their fellow Manhattanites, are incredibly litigious. So where do I come down — do I see these fellows as conservative penguins or gay swinger penguins? Well, call me crazy but they’re penguins, and I don’t look to these fellows for broader lessons in life, at least until this new ice age that’s about to frost up Europe gets going. Perhaps the problem is that penguins come, as it were, pre-anthropomorphised. The moment they come into view in Luc Jacquet’s documentary, waddling across the ice, swaying from side to side, they look like well-fed flat-footed pillars of the community making their way down Main Street to a Rotary Club luncheon. I once saw the great Les Dawson walking up Regent Street and the Emperor penguins remind me a bit of that. Jacquet and his two marvellous cinematographers, Laurent Chalet and Jerome Maison, shoot the snow and ice and sky with a kind of translucent beauty, which is nice, considering that’s pretty much all we see apart from penguins. But the minute you stick the cute little waddling Emperors out there it could be the opening sequence for Ice Age Two who needs animators? They’re like cartoon characters dropped in some godawful wasteland and left to fend for themselves.

Given the natural appeal of penguins, Jacquet might have thought twice about adding quite such an over-anthropomorphised commentary, read by Morgan Freeman, whose distinctive voice only underlines the arch over-egging. Narratorwise, I’d have plumped for someone more anonymous, a voice that would help you lose yourself in the Antarctic. Which is, after all, what Jacquet and his team did. They set out to follow the Emperors on their annual late-summer group march to the thick centre of the Antarctic ice where they mate and endure a long, gruelling winter-long birthing ritual before marching back to the sea. It’s essentially the Scott expedition in a penguin suit and with more sex: just like the Emperors, Scott and Bill Wilson and Apsley Cherry-Gerrard and the rest were slogging their way to the rookery in winter in hopes of getting their paws on one penguin egg.

You’d think that would be enough. But Morgan Freeman begins his narration by telling us that this is ‘a story about love. And like all love stories this one begins with an act of utter foolishness ... ’ Oh, come off it. There’s no ‘You had me at hello’ going on here. There are certainly moments of warmth and tenderness in their courtship rituals but the march of the penguins is a tough survival strategy for a killer climate of 80-below-zero temperatures, 100-mile-per-hour winds, and days that are all-night. ‘The father prepares to sever the bond between them,’ says Freeman. ‘This is not easy to do.’ Are you sure about that? ‘The loss is unbearable,’ he tells us as one penguin confronts the death of her baby. But, in fact, the penguin does bear it. And the emotional devastation he imputes to her is hard to square with a scene in which the grown-up penguins stand around nonchalantly doing bugger all while their defenceless moppets are attacked by a savage leopard seal.

What’s going on? Presumably they figure that if the killer seal sates himself with the weakest among them he’ll leave everyone else alone. If I were as eager as other commentators to look for the big picture in penguin movies, I’m sure I could mount an argument that this is a metaphor for, say, the French authorities’ indifference to Muslim attacks on Jewish schools. That’s certainly more plausible than Freeman’s Meg Ryanising of the little fellows, but in the end just as pointless.

So forget Freeman’s voiceover and the overly nudging score, and enjoy the cinematography and the animals and a vivid pictorial record of a system they’ve made work in one of the crummiest parts of the world. They’re great-looking penguins, so why worry about a larger message? The Emperors have no clothes, and they don’t need ’em.