Stan & Ollie (2018): Lords of Futility Meet Father Time

 Sweet, nostalgic, funny, melancholy, atmospheric and charming are just a few of the adjectives which come to mind in connection with Stan & Ollie, the new film about – you guessed it – Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. For those over fifty, Laurel and Hardy need no introduction.  You probably grew up watching some of their short films on Saturday morning television, as I did. Even then, they were recognizably from an earlier time, but they were still funny. Very funny. For everyone else, perhaps a little introduction will be helpful.

Laurel and Hardy are widely regarded as the greatest comedy duo ever in the history of motion pictures. Together, between 1927 and 1945, they made 32 silent short films, another 40 short films with sound, and 22 feature films (a final feature, made in 1950, was essentially disowned by the duo).  

Some might argue that Abbott and Costello, very popular on radio and the pictures in the 1940s and on television in the early fifties, were the greatest, but they’d be wrong. Abbot and Costello had neither the humanity nor the comic chops of Stan and Ollie. Unlike Laurel and Hardy, their style of humor derived laughs mostly from patter - epitomized in their justifiably famous bit Who’s on First?. But their comedy was ALL Lou Costello, tripped up by logic and prone to high pitched emotional outbursts; and although Abbott contributed a nice sense of timing (Groucho Marx once called him the greatest straight man in the business), he was not at all funny. Some diehards might cast their votes for Martin and Lewis, who were a screamingly funny team in the early fifties, following the Abbott and Costello era. (If you don’t believe me about how hot these guys were, take a look on YouTube.) Here again, their success, brief as it was, was chiefly attributable to one guy: Jerry Lewis.

Laurel and Hardy were a true team. Both were funny, albeit in very different ways. Oliver Hardy was the fat one with the little Hitler mustache, know-it-all manner and his look of simmering frustration, often expressed with a quick glance at the audience and a glower at his partner. Stan Laurel was the slender one with the British accent, unruly hair, bobbing eyebrows and vacant “what-just-happened?” expression. Their on-screen characters were very much of the Depression working class – frequently unemployed and looking for work. Both were pretty dumb and wonderfully, laughably inept. (Laurel, who wrote all of their material, later noted that the two were “two minds without a single thought.”)  Ollie, with zero self-knowledge, thought of himself as worldly and superior, and loved to boss poor Stan around. One senses that Stan’s character understood his own weakness, at least a little, and clung to Ollie for security. Wherever Laurel and Hardy went, whatever they did, slapstick chaos and disaster were sure to follow. Clothes were torn; paint, oil, coal dust or whatever messy substances were at hand wound up on everything, themselves especially; furniture, autos, pianos, entire houses were destroyed. Their best laid plans – well, they never managed even a poorly laid one.  Much of this is physical humor, which they perform with surprising grace; but the funniest stuff relies on their well-honed character traits and priceless reactions to the compounding futility of their labors.

Even their theme tune, The Cuckoo Song, evinces smiles.

Like the best early movie comedians - Chaplain, Keaton, Lloyd - Laurel and Hardy’s humor transcends time.  Watch one of their movies today, the short films especially, and if you’ve got a funny bone, you will laugh. A lot. Some of the gags catch you by surprise; others you can see from a mile away – but it doesn’t matter: the expressions, mannerisms and timing of these comic geniuses are funny regardless. And it’s a sweet, gentle sort of humor. Despite everything, no one ever gets seriously hurt, and the two comrades never stay angry at each other for more than a moment.  What Laurel and Hardy had onscreen is the purest form of what we’d now call bromance.

Author Kurt Vonnegut was a huge fan, and he recognized a very real dark side to Stan and Ollie’s haplessness. “I used to laugh my head off at Laurel and Hardy,” he said. “There is a terrible tragedy there somehow. These men are too sweet to survive in this world and are in terrible danger all the time. They could so easily be killed.” 

The new film, Stan & Ollie, stars a couple of other Laurel and Hardy aficionados: Steve Coogan [Philomena (2013), The Trip (2010)] as Stan, and John C Reilly [Chicago (2002), Wreck It Ralph (2012) /Ralph Breaks the Internet (2018)] as Ollie. It’s 1953, and aging comedians Laurel (then 63) and Hardy (age 61) are in the UK preparing for a tour of music halls all around England, trying to renew a career that has been in eclipse for several years. If they can pack in the crowds for their stage show,  performing some of the best bits from their movies along with a little of the old vaudeville, they’ll make some money, and more importantly, they’ll enhance the chances of getting a new movie contract.  

There are a lot of questions. Will the crowds actually turn out? Is Hardy, who is not just older but fatter and of questionable health, up to the task? Is their stuff still funny? Can they recreate the magic? And, at the core of the project (aside from money) is the big issue: do they care enough – about their legacy and about each other? There’s another question too: why should we, the current audience, care?

The answer to that last one is that this is a story beautifully told, and that the film, in relating this “based-on-real-facts” narrative, touches on deeper themes about friendship, aging, and legacy.  Also, the acting is amazing all around, including lovely turns by Shirley Henderson as Hardy’s wife Lucille and Nina Arianda as Laurel’s wife Ida, and brilliant work by the two leads, Coogan and Reilly. For one thing, they look just right, bearing remarkably close resemblances to Stan and Ollie. It’s extraordinary, uncanny really, how beautifully these talented actors are able to bring the familiar, long dead icons to life. Doubly so, in the sense that Coogan and Reilly credibly reanimate the Laurel and Hardy film personas performing the staged recreations of their act (and are quite funny doing so); while also and simultaneously showing us the real Stan Laurel and Oliver “Babe” Hardy.

This is harder than it may sound, because the actors each must convey  two separate characters, one emanating from the other and coexisting in the same physical body. So Coogan performs schtick as “Laurel” before a live audience, while also showing us in the cinema audience what Stan is actually thinking about how the performance is going and, perhaps, his concerns about his partner “Babe”. And Reilly is doing the same balancing act with respect to Oliver Hardy.

As we learn more about Laurel and Hardy’s professional history, as their vastly different personalities are revealed (Laurel was a workaholic who wrote and often directed much of their material; Babe preferred to luxuriate: eat, drink, gamble and carouse, not necessarily in that order); as we see each of these guys dealing with their wives, with their professional relationship and a long buried conflict, with the fleeting nature of success and, correspondingly, with their looming mortality, we feel as if we know them and grow fond.

By the end, they seem to know a bit more about each other and about what’s in their own hearts. Because at its core, Stan & Ollie is a love story.

98 minutes.                             Rated PG

Grade B+/A-

Rolling out to select theaters nationwide beginning January 11, 2019.

            [Follow this LINK and select “ Get Tickets” to find a theater near you.]