Stan & Ollie (***)

This is a nice movie about apparently nice men doing nice things. Stan and Ollie, better known as Laurel and Hardy, were the premier Hollywood comedy team of the 1930s and early 1940s. (Abbott and Costello followed them.) Steve Coogan plays Stan Laurel, the British half of the team and writer of most of their material. Hardy, the larger and American half of the team, is played by an unrecognizable John C. Reilly with a giant assist from the makeup department. They and he are quite convincing.

The first part of the movie is set in 1937, which helps establish the backstory—a key contract dispute, Ollie’s courtship of his third wife (Shirley Henderson), the kind of movies they made—but the rest is set in 1953. They’ve agreed to a tour of the British Isles, hoping to persuade a London mogul to finance a Robin Hood spoof Laurel is working on. Slow attendance and lesser accommodations await them, but they re-create the old magic for the fans. I heard Reilly say in an interview that only on this trip did the two men really get to know each other. I saw only a mild suggestion that they had not already known each other well. Perhaps this point comes across more in the book on which the film is based. What is clear is the mutual respect and the familiarity of the relationship.

Resentments from the past, Hardy’s declining health, and the uncertain status of the film project provide controversies, but nothing here is apt to agitate the blood. The arrival of the two wives barely stirs the pot, although their contrasting styles is funny. Still, the knowledge that these men were at the end of their career and past the peak of their popularity, while still carrying on more than 25 years into their partnership, provides a feeling of both warmth and melancholy. The old comedy routines, lovingly excerpted by Coogan and Reilly, probably seem less funny 65 years later, but almost everything about the movie is warm and likeable.

IMDB link

viewed 2019-01-19 at Ritz 5 and posted 2019-01-21