REVIEW

Intro: This bittersweet story of love, loss and friendship gets right to the heart of the real Laurel and Hardy

ACCORDING to the script writers and publicity material for Stan & Ollie, they claim that by watching it we should be able to laugh away the January blues.

Misleading, to say the least. This is undoubtedly a film of enormous charm, with matchingly superb performances from Steve Coogan (as Stan Laurel) and John C. Reilly (as Oliver Hardy). It isn’t, though – anywhere near it – the rib-tickling celebration of the silver screen’s greatest comedy double-act.

A critic will have noted that there are far more than a few chuckles in Stan & Ollie, but on the whole, it is rather maudlin, even melancholic of the original pair’s 1953 UK tour, the last time they worked together.

Their 1920s and 30s heyday are long behind them, and it has to be said they weren’t exactly warmly embraced by a country in the grip of post-war austerity. As they trudge from one barely half-full provincial theatre to the next, they are taunted everywhere – at least, as Jeff Pope’s screenplay tells us – by rhapsodies for the new kid on the block, Norman Wisdom.

The film begins, however, with a flashback to 1937, with the pair in their Hollywood pomp. Stan has just divorced for the second time and insists he won’t get married again. He’ll just find a woman he doesn’t like and buy her a house.

That’s an old gag, and a good one. But it might make you think for a second that maybe the drama would be compromised by a procession of faintly contrived one-liners.

You needn’t worry. With the experienced Pope as writer, and Jon S. Baird’s exceptional gifts as director, both audience and resurrection of characters are in safe hands.

By 1953, the double-act has foundered. This was primarily to do with Laurel’s Hollywood bust-up with powerful producer Hal Roach (Danny Huston). But almost at once comes the offer of a tour in Ulverston-born Stan’s native land. The somewhat more seductive suggestion was then made of a new British-funded movie project, based on the legend of Robin Hood.

The duo must learn to work together again. That was never going to be easy. Ollie’s failing health and the 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 at least, that the Robin Hood picture dangled as an inducement for riches, probably isn’t going to happen. A prominent poster for Abbott And Costello Go To Mars offers another sinister reminder that times and tastes have changed.

This story of a brace of great-promising 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 delightful, the casting of Mrs Laurel, a formidable Russian ex-dancer called Ida, and Mrs Hardy, the devoted Lucille, is as perfect a match as that of Coogan and Reilly.

The former is played, with glorious aplomb, by Nina Arianda. It does help that she gets some of the drama’s funniest lines, and a jolly running joke in her distaste for the oily impresario running the tour (Bernard Delfont, amusingly played by Rufus Jones). Nevertheless, underpinning both her character and Lucille’s (an equally 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. It’s made all the more poignant for being stretched to almost snapping point. Stan would never have made it without Ollie. He knows that he was one half of a whole.

As for the other half, many people would no doubt have loved to have seen Reilly winning a Golden Globe last week for his loveable, vulnerable turn as Ollie. Yet, in a way that would have been unfair on Coogan, who should also have been nominated and gives the best straight-acting performance of his career. But he has been duly included on last week’s BAFTAs shortlist announcement. That’s the least he deserves.

HE mimics well, of course, and captures almost perfectly Stan’s slightly nasal, mid-Atlantic vowels. The contrast between the performer and the man is impressively precise.

If there is a slight weakness it is within the stage routines – notably one involving a hard-boiled egg – which don’t adequately convey the pair’s comic genius. For those readers who grew up in the era watching Laurel and Hardy on Saturday morning television will hardly need telling why the duo were so joyously funny.

It is quite likely, then, that this heart-warming film is more likely to be cherished by those born in the mid-1960s, who will consider it a treat to watch.

Verdict: Charmingly tender

★★★★★