Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy were one of Hollywood’s funniest comedy teams. With Laurel penning their material, during their peak years, they exceeded such slapstick competitors as Abbott and Costello and the Three Stooges for their sophisticated irony. The skinny guy (Laurel) and the fat man (Hardy) were a couple of bunglers whose schemes to get ahead—or even just get along—were doomed before they began. The audience was always ahead of them and laughed hilariously as they saw the gags coming.
The final chapter of their career, which began in silent movies and petered out in the 1940s, is the endearingly told subject of Stan & Ollie. Steve Coogan and John C. Reilly disappear inside roles as Laurel and Hardy, respectively. They sound like the real comedians. They look like them, too.
Stan & Ollie is bittersweet in its depiction of their struggle to get through the British Isles tour that proved to be their last hurrah. By this time, the hits had stopped and Hardy had digressed into ill-advised movies without Laurel. The screenplay by British writer Jeff Pope elides the chronological complexity and makes it look as if the boys broke up in 1937, regrouping for their 1953 theatrical tour by way of preparing for a movie offer that never materialized. But, if the two-hour time frame can’t contain the fullness of their career, it does something more interesting by exploring the strained, yet vital emotional ties between them.
In Stan & Ollie, the two men are—platonically speaking—an old married couple who read each other’s faces and finish each other’s thoughts. They loved each other. The film wonders whether their comic act bled into their real-life behavior or if their act was based in part on who they really were. Offstage, this film’s Laurel and Hardy are more worldly, flawed versions of their cinematic selves, with the fat man addicted to gambling and outsize gestures, and the thin man capable of duplicity and bitter tears.
Stan & Ollie references many scenes from Laurel and Hardy movies. The steam trunk that slides down the steep stairs at a train station while on their way to the next show nods to Laurel and Hardy’s most enduring film, the Sisyphian struggle to haul a piano up the stairs in The Music Box. As in their movies, they have trouble keeping their black derby hats on straight.
Sentimentality was never part of any major Laurel and Hardy movie but inevitably comes to play in a film about the great comedians stumbling into old age, ill health and the distinct possibility that the world had turned and left them behind. Occasional anachronisms intrude. Hardy’s wife, Lucille (Shirley Henderson), criticizes his unhealthy “lifestyle,” a word invented by ad agencies decades after her husband’s demise. However, the discrepancies don’t distract from the film’s scenario. Stan & Ollie is a major achievement in acting for Coogan and Reilly and a moving tribute to the funny-sad men they portray.
Read an essay on Laurel and Hardy by Milwaukee film historian Eric Levine here.
