Saturday 2 March 2019

Stan & Ollie (2019) - Movie Review



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.

Between Steve Coogan’s comedic chops (when he isn’t being saddled with utter dreck like with Ideal Home) and John C. Reilly’s frankly underrated knack for character acting, they make for a great double-act, both comedically and dramatically. Comedically, they operate in such perfect synchronisation that they pay due tribute to the real-life performers, bringing the universality of their comedy roaring into the present day. Dramatically, their straight man/comic dynamic highlights them as a pairing that were perfect for each other… both for good and for bad.

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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