Time to take a trip back to the days of black-and-white
cinema with a look at one of vaudeville’s most beloved acts: Laurel &
Hardy. Vaudeville comedy has had such a tremendous impact not just on comedy
but the cinematic medium as a whole that it is quite possible to understate
just how important this movement was for the art form. From Charlie Chaplin to
the Three Stooges to Abbott & Costello, this field of pantomime performance
set a bedrock for pretty much every comedic work that would follow. As such, creating
a biopic in tribute to one of these acts requires not only a willingness to
respect the greats but also an objective admission of why they are the greats
to begin with. And in all of the important ways, this manages to do just that.
While the humour on display here serves to highlight just
how timeless this era of comedy truly was, this ultimately serves as more than
just a tribute to the duo’s body of work. If anything, this functions far more
vividly as a character study of the both of them, Stan Laurel in particular.
Through what has become the standard for modern biopics, we are shown two
performers who have become so attached to each other than the line between
their professional selves and their personal selves has practically melted
away. This is shown even stronger through the inclusion of their wives, played
by Shirley Henderson and Nina Arianda in varyingly outrageous accents. I swear,
their double act almost ends up outshining the title characters because the
timing is that on-point across the
board.
Have to admit, all of this feels a bit strange coming out of
a film made by Jon S. Baird, whose last feature-length outing was with Filth.
Filth was an adaptation of an Irvine Welsh novel that remains one of the single
most deliciously vile pieces of cinema of the entire 2010’s. Even with him
stepping out of the writer’s room for this, going off of a script by
Philomena’s Jeff Pope, this feels like a left turn for a creative like him…
until the heavier moments start to sink in.
That’s the truly remarkable thing about this whole
endeavour: The fact that it delivers on the comedy, yet the surprisingly tragic
moments build up slowly and naturally until it all unravels into a display of
incredibly fitting melancholy. When I said that Laurel & Hardy were perfect
for good and for bad, this is where the bad side comes out. They both come
across as compulsive in their performances, as if their love for comedy has
transcended into outright necessity. They have
to do this; that’s how in-sync they are both on and off-stage.
It regales in the splendour of creative art, but it also
doesn’t shy away from the downside of that mentality, emphasised most by Stan,
whose devotion to his partner reaches the realms of true heartache as we
approach the third act. It even makes for one of the saddest
‘text-on-black-screen’ moments I think I’ve ever witnessed with just a single
line about what Stan was doing between the death of Ollie and his own death.
The end result of all this is a tribute to the legendary
vaudeville act that seems to tip the hat to pretty much everything that makes
them important. From their comedic style to their personal and professional
relationship to that uncomfortable feeling when a comedian knows that the times
have passed them by, even down to the juxtaposition of vaudeville and tragedy
that also has a healthy foundation in the world of cinema, as anyone who has
seen The Great Dictator was attest. It’s definitely not the kind of film I was
expecting from the guy who gave us Filth… but holy hell, is this a film that
needs to be seen.
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