Mr. Popper's Penguins
“Six unexpected houseguests are about to turn one man's perfect life upside down.”
Director
Mark Waters
Release
5 August 2011
Runtime
94 Minutes
Certificate
PG
Synopsis
Tom Popper is a highly successful real-estate developer who knows how to close a deal. His professional life is organised around winning over difficult clients, but his family relationships aren't nearly as successful. Then a package arrives from his late father. Inside is a live penguin. Before Popper can work out what he's supposed to do with it, a misunderstanding results in five more penguins arriving at his apartment. His immaculate Manhattan home rapidly becomes unsuitable for human habitation and increasingly perfect for its six new residents. Getting rid of them should be the obvious solution. Instead, Popper's children grow attached to the animals, and Popper discovers that the chaos they've introduced into his life is reconnecting him with the family he's allowed to drift away. At the same time, his career depends on completing one of his biggest deals. Popper eventually has to decide whether maintaining the successful life he constructed matters more than repairing the relationships he neglected along the way.
The Movie Trailer
Mr. Popper's Penguins is a 2011 family comedy starring Jim Carrey as Tom Popper, a successful New York businessman whose carefully organised life is thrown into chaos when he unexpectedly inherits a penguin.
And then another five arrive.
Popper initially sees his new houseguests as little more than an enormous problem, particularly when his Manhattan apartment begins transforming into an increasingly elaborate home for them.
But the penguins gradually change more than Popper's living arrangements.
As his unusual new family grows, Popper begins to reconsider his relationship with his children, his former wife, and the priorities that have shaped his life.
UNEXPECTED DELIVERY
Six Penguins Turn Popper's World Upside Down
Tom Popper is accustomed to controlling his surroundings.
His career depends upon planning, persuasion and knowing exactly what needs to happen next.
Six penguins don't particularly care about any of that.
Their arrival transforms Popper's carefully maintained apartment into chaos and forces him to deal with something his professional instincts cannot easily solve.
What begins as an unwanted inheritance gradually becomes the catalyst for Popper to reconsider a life that looks successful from the outside but has left some of his most important relationships behind.
JIM CARREY ON ICE
Physical Comedy Meets an Apartment Full of Penguins
Jim Carrey's energetic style of physical comedy makes him an obvious match for a story built around an increasingly uncontrollable group of penguins.
Popper spends much of the film trying to impose order on animals that have transformed his home into their playground.
But beneath the slapstick is a quieter change in the character.
The more time Popper spends looking after the penguins, the more his children want to spend time with him. What initially appears to be another inconvenience becomes an unexpected opportunity to rebuild his family.
FAMILY COMES FIRST
The Penguins Give Popper Something His Career Couldn't
The central transformation in Mr. Popper's Penguins isn't really the apartment gradually turning into a frozen habitat.
It's Popper himself.
His career has taught him to see almost every situation as a transaction to be negotiated and completed. Family doesn't work that way.
The penguins force Popper away from the routines that have defined him and create circumstances in which his children begin seeing their father differently.
By disrupting the life he thought he wanted, six unlikely houseguests give Popper the chance to recognise what was missing.