Movie Review: Stan & Ollie

Stan & Ollie **** / *****

Directed by: Jon S. Baird.

Written by: Jeff Pope.

Starring: John C. Reilly (Olivier Hardy), Steve Coogan (Stan Laurel), Shirley Henderson (Lucille Hardy), Nina Arianda (Ida Kitaeva Laurel), Danny Huston (Hal Roach), Rufus Jones (Bernard Delfont).

 

The biopic Stan & Ollie is smart about a lot of things – but perhaps the smartest is not making a movie about legendary comedy duo Laurel & Hardy at the height of their fame, but rather in their last days together. While it wouldn’t be fair to say that Laurel & Hardy have been forgotten these days – it would be fair to say that it’s a lot harder to see their films than many of their contemporaries or rivals – Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, even Abbott & Costello (all of whom get name checked in the film) are easier to track down than Laurel & Hardy – which you pretty much have to find on DVD (I know – before seeing this film, I wanted to revisit films like Sons of the Desert or Way Out West that I haven’t seen in years, and found it impossible to find them anywhere. Stan & Ollie then is smart to set the film in 1953 – when the pair are older, not making movies anymore, and find everyone surprised that they are still performing and haven’t retired yet. People at least know how they are then – which people do now – but it’s appropriate for a film about aging and the fear of being forgotten to be set now rather than in their glory days.

 

We catch a brief glimpse of those days – in the dynamic opening shot of Stan & Ollie – than follows the pair through the studio lot, charming the strangers they meet, while in their private moments complaining about their mounting failed marriages, and how cheap their boss – Hal Roach – is. There will be contract negotiations coming up – Laurel goes first, and then the next year Hardy – and they’re big stars, so of course they’ll get a raise if they just stick together. What happens next, we will eventually find out, but has kind of acted as an unspoken mark of their friendship – neither one of them wants to bring it up because they know what will happen if they do (and, of course, it eventually does).

 

The pair of legendary comedians are played by John C. Reilly and Steve Coogan – and while neither would have been the first person I thought of to play either role, they are pretty much perfect in the roles anyway. Reilly is buried under a lot of makeup, and yet it doesn’t diminish his performance in the slightest. He’s a big man, paying for the excesses of his youth with a bum heart, and a lot of extra weight. And yet, on stage, he’s still magic. Coogan plays Laurel, the writer of the two of them, and needs far less makeup to become Laurel, but matches with Reilly well. On stage, Reilly and Coogan are wonderful together – they have an instant chemistry with each other. Stan & Ollie are embarking on this tour to try and convince a studio that they still have it – so that they will fund a Robin Hood movie for the pair of them. The first shows feature fairly paltry crowds – but after they are talked into a tiring amount of publicity as well, they start to sell well. And that laughter is addictive. Soon they are joined by their wives – Shirley Henderson playing Lucille Hardy, and Nina Arianada playing Ida Kitaeva Laurel) – and the two wonderful actresses have as much chemistry together as the men playing their husbands. Their verbal sparring matches are straight out of classic screwball comedy – and delivered amazingly well.

 

The film doesn’t avoid all the trappings of a showbiz biopic – but it does avoid most of them. In particular, since they are essentially doing old routines, we aren’t stuck with the type of flash of genius revelations we get in films of this sort when the people come up with their most famed works (as Walk Hard, with Reilly, mercilessly spoofed – and Bohemian Rhapsody last year shamelessly still tried to pull off with a straight face). And perhaps because Laurel & Hardy are a little further in the past than say Queen, it’s less annoying to see Reilly and Coogan recreate the duos most famous bits (and also, you know, because they actually did them – they didn’t do whatever the physical comedy version of lip synching would be.

 

And yet, when the final act gets here, and the find really turns up the heat and tries to get you to get emotional, it doesn’t feel cheap as it often can. The film has somehow earned those tears that it wants you to cry when you see the pair on stage for the last time together – not to mention the now standard issue text on screen at the end to tell you what happened after – which for once actually tells you something truly affecting. So yes, there are clichés here – but the overall film is so charming and funny, with such wonderful performances, I hardly cared.