Mark Reviews Movies: STAN & OLLIE

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Review by Mark Dujsik | December 27, 2018

The relationship at the heart of Stan & Ollie is fascinating. By the looks of it, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy must have been friends. They spent such so much time together, performing and writing and doing publicity, over the course of a career as a duo, which spanned almost three decades. It's impossible to believe that they weren't friends.

The film begins in 1937, when the two were at the height of their popularity, and while making their way across the studio lot toward the set of their latest project, they talk easily and quite personally about their current lives. It's little wonder they seem so in harmony while performing, dancing a little jig in front of a rear-projected Old West town. There was genuine harmony between them off-set, too.

Jeff Pope's screenplay doesn't suggest that the bond between them was a sham or anything negative of that sort. It does, though, portray the relationship as a considerable paradox.

They're friends, yes, but that friendship was founded upon studio invention. The duo's goal is simply to make movies that will entertain and make money. It is, first and foremost, a business partnership—a fact that they both realize and comprehend. A person, though, can't spend as many working hours over so many years with another person without that connection growing into something more. This relationship is one of constant, if mostly unspoken, conflict between the professional and the personal.

The paradox is that Stan (Steve Coogan) and Oliver (John C. Reilly) are the best of friends and, simply because of the nature of their partnership, also not friends at all. The conflict here begins shortly after the story's start, when Stan's contract with the studio is up in the air, while Oliver's is quite secure.

Stan's negotiations with producer Hal Roach (Danny Huston) don't go well, leaving the constantly in-debt Oliver with a dilemma: He can make another movie without his partner, or he can lose the chance to make some easy money with a different co-star. He chooses the latter, because there are racetrack bets to be made and alimony to pay and a new woman in his life to woo.

Sixteen years later, the duo's popularity has been on a downward trajectory. The medium of the short film, which made them famous, has gone out of style. Other stars and acts have become famous, leaving them behind. Stan is holding out hope that they'll get financing for a long-germinating comedy feature about Robin Hood. The plan is for the two to go on a tour of the United Kingdom, and from that success, the money for the movie will fall into their laps.

Stan is also still holding a grudge against Oliver for that time he made the "elephant film" while Stan was having contractual issues. Oliver doesn't seem to care about the decision. It was, after all, just business, and their business relationship is the only thing in writing.

How many famous duos or groups have ended because of this paradox? It's perhaps a minor miracle that these two were able to overcome it, remaining professional partners until Hardy's health prevented him from performing. The film's coda reveals that Laurel never worked with another partner following Hardy's death in 1957. By comparison, the partnership between Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, whose own comedy career is referenced here by a large poster that Stan and Oliver walk by, lasted for about 20 years. Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, whose popularity overtook Abbott and Costello's fame, could stand each other for only a decade before parting ways.

Director Jon S. Baird's portrait of the two comedians, as they perform and try to sell seats for what would fundamentally become a farewell tour, makes the case that it ultimately was the professional side of the partnership that made it last as long as it did. The grudges, the bickering, and the resentment were present and probably got in the way of the two becoming actual, honest-to-goodness friends, but their bond is somehow much deeper here.

It's one of a shared purpose to make people laugh. Whether they loved, barely tolerated, or secretly hated each other is irrelevant. Above all else, they were showmen. They knew nothing else, and each one knew it was the only thing that mattered for the other.

The two men eventually voice that philosophy by the end of the film, but it's an implicit constant through the entirety of the story. One of the real joys of this biography is that Pope, Baird, and the team of Coogan and Reilly see just about every interaction between and surrounding Stan and Oliver as a piece of performance.

They have been at the game together for so long that everything is a potential bit, whether or not they're on stage. Ringing the bell at the desk of a hotel lobby becomes a gag, and when Stan and Oliver's wives—respectively, Ida (Nina Arianda) and Lucille (Shirley Henderson)—arrive, the two turn the reunion into a joke. They couldn't not do comedy, even if they tried. When they get into a public quarrel, the onlookers aren't sure if it's part of an act.

It's bittersweet, this relationship, as it almost is solidified in a kind of desperation—to always be on, making comedy. Stan & Ollie understands that drive, and more importantly, the film feels honest in how it portrays these two men as being simultaneously much more and much less than friends. They were Laurel and Hardy, and they wouldn't have had it any other way—partly because there was no other option and partly because they loved it.

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