THE PERFECT ODD COUPLE
Laurel and Hardy’s star was fading, but two spot-on, bittersweet portrayals make the flawed geniuses shine
THE publicity material for Stan & Ollie claims that by watching it, we can laugh away ‘the January blues’. Don’t be misled. This is a sweet film of enormous charm, with matchingly wonderful performances from Steve Coogan as Stan Laurel and John C. Reilly as Oliver Hardy, but a rib-tickling celebration of the silver screen’s greatest comedy double-act it most certainly ain’t.
Sure, there are more than a few chuckles in Stan & Ollie, but on the whole it is a rather maudlin, even melancholic account of the pair’s 1953 Ireland and British tour, the last time they worked together.
Their Twenties and Thirties heyday is long behind them, and they aren’t exactly warmly embraced by the English in the rather colder embrace of post-war austerity. As they trudge from one half-full provincial theatre to the next, they are taunted everywhere — at least, as Jeff Pope’s screenplay tells it — by rhapsodies for the new slapstick kid on the block, Norman Wisdom.
The film begins, however, with a flashback to 1937, with the pair in their Hollywood pomp. Stan is just divorced for the second time and insists that he won’t get married again, he’ll just find a woman he doesn’t like and buy her a house.
It’s an old gag and a good one, but it made me think for a second that maybe the drama would be compromised by a procession of faintly contrived one-liners.
I needn’t have worried. With the experienced Pope as writer, and Jon S. Baird’s sure direction (oddly, his last film was a raucous adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s novel Filth), both we and Laurel and Hardy are in safe hands.
By 1953, the double-act has foundered, largely on the back of Laurel’s Hollywood bust-up with powerful producer Hal Roach (Danny Huston). But then comes the offer of a tour in Ulverston-born Stan’s native land, and the somewhat more seductive suggestion of a new British-funded movie project, based on the legend of Robin Hood.
The duo must learn to work together again. But with Ollie’s health failing and underlying tensions caused by the work he has done without Stan, their mutual respect and deep affection is subject to constant strain.
IT also becomes clear, to Stan if not Ollie (or ‘Babe’ as he was known to his friends and family), that the Robin Hood picture probably isn’t going to happen. A prominent poster for Abbott And Costello Go To Mars offers a further cruel reminder that times and tastes have changed.
This story of a brace of great careers gently fizzling out is in danger of becoming just a little too forlorn when everyone, the audience as well as Laurel and Hardy, gets a boost like a surge of electricity with the arrival from America of their wives.
Happily, they have both found connubial bliss, and even more happily, the casting of Mrs Laurel, a formidable Russian ex-dancer called Ida, and Mrs Hardy, the devoted Lucille, is as perfect as that of Coogan and Reilly.
The former is played, gloriously, by Nina Arianda. It helps that she gets some of the drama’s funniest
lines s, and a jolly running joke in her dist taste for the oily impresario ning the tour (Bernard Delfont, runn less, amusingly played by Rufu us Jones). But underpinning h her character and Lucille’s (an equaally fine performance by Shirley Henderson) is adoration and concern for their menfolk.
Indeed, on more than one level, Stan & Ollie is a love story. It’s about the love between husbands and wives, and about the love Laurel and Hardy engendered in their audiences, but mostly it’s about the love they had for each other, all the more poignant for being stretched almost to snapping point. In this respect I was reminded of a terrific recent TV drama called Eric, Ernie and Me, about Morecambe and Wise and their writer Eddie Braben. It contains a scene in which
Eric, Morecambe just like Stan, asserts petulantly that he is the senior partner; that Ernie would never have made it without him. But really Eric knew, as Stan did, that he was one half of a whole. As for the other half, I’d love to have seen Reilly win a Golden Globe this week for his loveable, vulnerable turn as Ollie. But in a way that would have been unfair on Coogan, who should also have been nominated (and duly was, in the Baftas shortlist announced this week) and gives the best straight-acting performance of his career.
HE’S a superb mimic, of course, and captures perfectly Stan’s slightly nasal, mid-Atlantic vowels. But even more impressively, he captures just as precisely the contrast between the performer and the man. I should add that I have already seen Stan & Ollie twice, the first time with my 23-year-old son, an aspiring comedy writer and performer himself, who brought along his writing partner.
They left a little nonplussed, feeling that they have to work a whole lot harder for laughs than Laurel and Hardy did, and in truth the film’s only slight weakness is that its stage routines — notably one involving a hard-boiled egg —don’t adequately convey the pair’s comic genius.
But I saw it again with a large bunch of friends of my own age, who grew up as I did watching Laurel and Hardy shorts on Saturday morning telly.
They didn’t need telling why the duo were so joyously funny, and are also all old enough to understand the impact that the ageing process makes on friendships and careers.
So it could be that this heartwarming film is more likely to be cherished by the over-50s and, like they often did on Saturday mornings, consider it a treat to join the trail of the lonesome pine.