Comedy film legends deserved better
Actors’ performances shine, but there are many flaws in Laurel and Hardy biopic
When we first meet Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy — played by fellow funnymen Steve Coogan and John C. Reilly — it’s 1937 in Hollywood, and the two men can’t catch a break from their skinflint producer Hal Roach (Danny Huston). But most of the film is set in 1953, during the duo’s late-career tour of Britain, when they played to small crowds in undersized venues. The message seems to be that these comedy greats deserved better.
They did, and they still do. The best thing about Stan & Ollie is Ollie and Stan, so perfectly do the actors embody their roles. They are utterly believable, not only in their individual mannerisms, but in the way they relate to one another.
Example? When Hardy is laid up in bed by illness, Laurel pays him a visit, and we are reminded of a “bit” they’ve done onstage, in which Hardy winds up bonked on the head or deprived of food. But in the private version, Hardy complains he’s cold and asks his partner to pull up the covers; Laurel complies, but somehow ends up in bed as well, and the two continue their chat like kids at a sleepover.
Where the film fails to connect is in the lacklustre direction by Jon S. Baird (which includes such clanging anachronisms as a modern Canadian flag flying over the Savoy Hotel in London) and in the screenplay by Jeff Pope, Oscar-nominated for his work with Coogan on the script for Philomena. Early scenes feel like they’re trying too hard to establish the characters — “You’ve got a million of ’em, don’t you?” says Hardy — hardly the sort of remark you’d make to someone you’ve been working beside for years.
And then there’s the question of whether they were “on” in public. (Most comedians aren’t.) I’ll allow that, when they arrived at a dingy hotel in Newcastle for the first leg of their tour, they might have a bit of fun for the amusement of the receptionist. Less believable is the scene in a train station where each lets go of a piece of luggage at the same moment, causing it to slide down a flight of stairs. (Punchline: “Do we really need that trunk?”).
Then again, Laurel and Hardy haven’t received the same posthumous attention as some of their contemporaries, and that’s reason enough to celebrate this fond look back. Last year saw the release of The Great Buster, a Keaton documentary by Peter Bogdanovich. Abbott and Costello remain alive and well in pop culture, as do Chaplin and the Marx brothers. But Laurel and Hardy are often remembered as an image — bowler hats, pained expressions — rather than in motion.
The movie wisely holds back from trying to cover the whole of the duo’s career, which included more than 100 films over three decades, from the 1921 short The Lucky Dog to the Italy-France co-production Atoll K in 1951. But it may be making too much dramatic hay from a “split” between the two in 1939, when Hardy starred in Elephants Never Forget without his partner; though it’s a nice touch that the elephant in the room involves an actual elephant in a room.
Theirs seems to have been a happy partnership, and certainly more stable than their love lives. Laurel had one common-law marriage and five legal ones (he married one woman twice), while Hardy was married three times. Their wives of the moment are played by Shirley Henderson and the delightfully batty Nina Arianda.
And there are some lovely moments that are joyfully true to life, such as the time they men visited Cobh, Ireland. Laurel once recalled in an interview: “All the church bells in Cobh started to ring out our theme song, Dance of the Cuckoos, and Babe (Hardy’s nickname) looked at me and we cried. I’ll never forget that day. Never.”