Dream cast deliver in Stan & Ollie
Stan and Ollie (PG, 97 mins) Directed by Jon S Baird Reviewed by Graeme Tuckett ★★★1 ⁄2
They were comedy’s greatest duo, one of very few Hollywood acts that made a successful transition from silent to sound, and their influence is still visible and acknowledged today in the work of anyone who uses mime and physicality to deliver and enhance a joke.
It’s not humanly possible to learn much about Laurel and Hardy’s work and lives without falling completely in awe with who they were, what they achieved and of how much of what we call comedy today simply wouldn’t exist if Laurel and Hardy, along with Chaplin, Lloyd, Keaton and the women and men they collaborated with, hadn’t been there to invent it.
Laurel and Hardy – Stan Laurel and Oliver ‘‘Babe’’ Hardy – had the world at their feet in the early 1930s. But their contracts prevented them ever making the money that owning their own films would have delivered.
And Hardy’s mild-mannered persona made him far too much of a pushover to ever negotiate a better deal for himself. And so it was that by 1953, with their film career a distant memory, the duo reformed to travel the British Isles for a planned couple of months, to raise some cash and maybe use the publicity to get a new movie financed. It would be the last time they ever toured together.
Stan and Ollie is director Jon Baird’s (Filth) and writer Jeff Pope’s (who co-wrote Philomena
with Steve Coogan, who plays Stan Laurel here) love letter to Laurel and Hardy. The film takes many liberties with the timelines, but it also gets a great deal very right.
Coogan as Laurel and John C Reilly as Hardy are a casting dream. Coogan, in particular, absolutely sticks the steely professionalism and precision it took to portray the clumsiness and whimsy that were Laurel’s stock in trade.
Beside him, Reilly doesn’t make quite the same impression as Hardy off-stage, but is spookily good in his inhabitation of the big man’s balletic grace and unearthly onstage timing. Even better, in a way, are Nina Arianda (Goliath)
and Shirley Henderson
(Trainspotting) as the wives of the two men.
Their arrival in the picture kicks off the second act, and from then on Stan and Ollie is a movie infused with more energy and actual laughs than the slightly clumsy structure and unambitious script had been earning.
At its best, Stan and Ollie locates a lovely seam of pathos, dignity, wit and human decency that never quite slips into syrup and sentiment. With a less prickly and transparently vulnerable Stan than Coogan, that would have been a danger. All that lets the film down, really, is a slightly disappointing shift behind the camera from cinematographer Laurie Rose.
Apart from a derivative, but nicely choreographed opening stanza, Stan and Ollie looks to have been shot with a small-screen audience in mind.
Everything is a mid-shot or close-up, often distractingly over-lit in a way that never let me lose myself in the story.
Last week’s local release Hang Time is a better-looking film, on about 1 per cent or less of the Stan and Ollie budget. And one thing more. A couple of years ago, Pablo Larrain’s No solved the problem of seamlessly integrating re-created 1970s archival footage into a drama by shooting the entire film on period-authentic U-Matic videotape. It looked fantastic.
Stan and Ollie, aided hugely by Coogan and Reilly’s performances, is in love with the idea that for Laurel and Hardy, the line where the soundstage ended and real-life began was permeable and often nonexistent.
So it would have been a bold, beautiful and perfectly justified decision to have shot Stan and Ollie in black-and-white. Seeing Coogan and Reilly bring the duo to life within the visual palette we already know them from could have really set this film on fire.