The Penguin Has Mommy Issues
As any fan of Batman knows, the main draw of the franchise are the villains. While Batman himself has an interesting story—a billionaire who trains to become a vigilante detective after witnessing the murder of his parents—his opponents are what define him and allow his story to resonate.
Not only do they serve as foils to Batman, but they are also his alter-egos and counterpoints. In this vein, many of them represent a certain philosophical outlook: Joker is the absurdist cynic, Two-Face is the jaded nihilist, Riddler is the egotistical rationalist, Mr. Freeze is the pessimistic stoic, Bane is the Nietzschean Darwinist, and Penguin is the flamboyant Machiavellian. In every battle with these characters, Batman proves himself to be the well-rounded Aristotelian, holding fast to empirical reality and applying logic to thwart his villains.
Indeed, as the Lego Batman Movie brilliantly pointed out, Batman needs his villains. Without them, he is a ridiculous narcissist who dons a bat costume and pretends to be a superhero all to avoid confronting his personal problems and making friends.
However, the reverse is also true: Batman’s villains need Batman. Otherwise, they are simply deranged psychopaths terrorizing Gotham. Although this premise seems to allow filmmakers to explore the nature of evil and corruption or turn these characters into antiheroes, it mainly results in one-dimensional characters, linear plots, and overdone themes.
Some might cite The Joker as an exception, but the movie’s success had everything to do with Joaquin Phoenix’s superb performance, its gritty style, and its willingness to bring up the problem of emasculated, disenfranchised men, and almost nothing to do with its story, characters, or world-building. For the most part, the film’s success was a fluke, and the failure of its sequel confirms this. Audiences wanted to finally see Joker fight Batman, not watch a failed comedian moping around 1970s New York regularly lapsing into delusions yet again.
The Penguin on HBO Max should have learned this lesson. Instead, it seeks to do the same thing as The Joker, telling the story of a popular Batman villain without bringing in Batman. This inevitably means that the plot will be thin and succeed or fail on its style and acting alone.
And in this limited sense, The Penguin actually hits the mark—for a little while. Colin Ferrell and his costar Cristin Milioti put in amazing performances, and the gothic grittiness of Gotham is amply captured. Yet, however well this could have worked in a feature-length film, this begins to wear thin after a few hour-long episodes.
This first becomes apparent with the implausible transformation of Milioti’s character, Sofia Falcone, from a dutiful daughter of the late mafia don Carmine Falcone to a cold-hearted mafia matriarch hellbent on destroying the Falcone family (and who strangely resembles Winona Ryder’s character Lydia in Beetlejuice).
What could have been an interesting character who slowly loses her soul (something like Michael Corleone in The Godfather) simply becomes an evil girlboss waging a war against the criminal patriarchy. It’s never explained how she can take control as easily as she does, or why anyone would trust her when she is inexplicably released from Arkham Asylum, but her cause is so justified that the audience is supposed to go along with it. As for Milioti, she does what she can with what she’s given, but her ice-cold rage soon feels like boredom as she’s forced to maintain a tough-guy pose all throughout.
Ferrell’s character Oz Cobb elicits interest a few episodes longer, but also struggles from poor writing and character development. At first, Oz is making his way up the mafia hierarchy as he stokes a conflict between two big crime families and plays both sides against one another. In each scene, he keeps up the hustle, managing operations, creating opportunities for himself, and improvising when things go awry. Unfortunately, these virtues quickly fade as he starts making a series of dumb mistakes and showing poor judgement in later episodes. Towards the end of the season, he devolves into an underworld demagogue giving speeches to fellow gangsters and continually seeking his mother’s approval. Like Milioti, Ferrell does what he can with what he’s given, but he is visibly running on fumes by the end of the season.
Meanwhile, the supporting cast is mediocre from the start. Most of this is due to poor writing, but in the case of Rhenzy Feliz a large part of it is due to a weak acting performance. As the stuttering young henchman of Oz, Victor Aguilar, he’s obviously intended to be a kind of protege, morphing from a traumatized orphan to a ruthless enforcer, but he never changes his tone or expressions even when the script calls for it. He stupidly stutters and fumbles the whole time, never making it clear why he does what he does or what in his story justifies taking up so much screen time.
All of this could be saved with a strong plot, but it’s so shot through with holes and inconsistencies meant to enable Sofia and Oz to succeed despite themselves. As with other mafia films, law enforcement and the justice system are virtually nonexistent, making it easy for the criminals to act with abandon. This might be the moment someone like Batman intervenes, but he’s completely absent. Thus, the story unfolds slowly and predictably, with the audience mostly waiting the whole season for the dust to settle so that Batman can come back.
Does The Penguin at least work on a thematic level? This is perhaps the biggest missed opportunity. In the comics, the Penguin is an angry man struggling with deep insecurity because of his deformity. He compensates for this by posing as a gentleman caricature (complete with a monocle and top hat) and manipulating his way to the top. His physical deformity becomes spiritual as he engages in criminal activity allowing him to take over Gotham’s underworld.
Some of this is depicted in The Penguin, but it’s quickly eclipsed by the tedious female empowerment narrative of Sofia and the equally tedious fallen innocence narrative of Victor. Along with Oz’s vain attempts to please his senile mother, these parallel narratives act like filler to bulk up the Penguin’s unnecessarily thin story.
Possibly sensing the fatigue of the audience, the writers use the last scenes of the season to tease at a big showdown between Penguin and Batman along with an appearance of Catwoman. If so, that might make up for some of the show’s faults so far, but not all of them. Assuming they actually show up, Batman and Catwoman will have the double-burden of saving Gotham and saving this series. Only they, and they alone, can create an effective counterweight that would restore some much needed tension and depth to the currently underwhelming stories of Sofia Falcone and the Penguin.
Auguste Meyrat is an English teacher in the Dallas area. He holds an MA in humanities and an MEd in educational leadership. He is the senior editor of The Everyman and has written essays for The Federalist, The American Conservative, and The Imaginative Conservative, as well as the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture. Follow him on Twitter.
