'Stan & Ollie': John C. Reilly & Steve Coogan Are Excellent As The Comedy Legends [LFF Review]

lIt’s easy to feel by the middle of September that awards season is locked up – the vast majority of contenders revealed, and the winner a good bet (it’s a decade since a movie that skipped the fall festival circuit won Best Picture). Clint Eastwood’s “The Mule,” for instance, which got a late-breaking fall release date in the hope of upending the races.

Another surprise potential to have emerged in the last few months is “Stan & Ollie,” a biopic of comedy legends Laurel & Hardy from Oscar-nominated “Philomena” writer Jeff Pope, and “Filth” director Jon S. Baird. It had been under the radar for a little while, but buzz has been building over the last few months since Sony Pictures Classics picked the movie up and slated it for a December release. The movie had its world premiere at the closing night film of the BFI London Film Festival tonight, and the good news is that the buzz was justified about those turns. The bad news… well, we’ll get to that.

When we first meet our heroes, Stan Laurel (Steve Coogan) and Oliver Hardy (John C. Reilly), known to his friends as ‘Babe,’ it’s through a nominally impressive Steadicam stroll through the backlot of Hal Roach Studios during the production of their seminal Western comedy “Way Out West.” Stan, the creative brains of the operation and the on-screen goof, is about to have his contract expire, and is keen to negotiate a better deal away from Roach (Danny Huston). But Ollie — mostly happy to take the easy route in life and particularly concerned about being able to afford his upcoming marriage to script girl Lucille (Shirley Henderson)– doesn’t back him, and they end up briefly parting ways.

Sixteen years later, their careers in decline and with most fans believing they’ve retired, the pair arrive in Newcastle for a tour of Britain booked by theatrical producer Delfont (Rufus Jones). The plan is for a big-time movie producer to come and see the end of the tour in London to help seal the deal for a Robin Hood movie that Laurel is writing. But the theaters they’re playing are grubby and mostly empty, putting the remainder of the tour at risk, and that’s even without taking into account long-held resentments between them, and Hardy’s failing health.

It’s a relatively thin story, but in fairness, the film exists mainly as a showcase for Coogan and Reilly’s performances as the iconic duo. And on that level, it absolutely delivers. In part thanks to his (very impressive) “Darkest Hour”-style make-up job, Reilly has the showier role for once, and he’s wonderful, almost eerily evoking Hardy physically while also showing a very different side to the performer’s straight-man on-screen persona. Between this and his arguably even better turn in “The Sisters Brothers,” Reilly’s in the form of his life at the minute.

Coogan is, at first, a little more jarring – Laurel’s trademark smile sits a little funnily on his face, and his transatlantic accent (Laurel was from Britain originally, but picked up some American vowels over the years) initially and falsely gives the impression that the actor hasn’t nailed the voice. But once the performance settles in, it might reveal itself to be Coogan’s most exceptional dramatic work to date. Laurel’s the more complex figure of the two and his evident love and admiration for his partner and his inability to say as much prove to be the emotional heart of the movie.

Crucially, they also have great chemistry together, entirely convincing as long-time colleagues slipping back into easy back-and-forth and enjoying each other’s company, even as they don’t quite confront past issues. When the film eventually moves you, which it does, it’s a testament to their work together. Unsurprisingly for two actors with strong comic backgrounds, they’re also very good at playing Laurel & Hardy’s material, and Baird and Pope smartly find ways to pay homage to or squeeze in classic bits even when they’re not on stage.

The trouble? There’s not all that much film to the film beyond those two (admittedly excellent) turns. Pope’s script rightly keeps the story to a contained frame of time rather than trying to tell the entire sweep of Laurel & Hardy’s career, but the beats feel, well, biopic-y and familiar — there’s not much here that, for one, “The Sunshine Boys” didn’t cover before and better. Henderson and Nina Arianda (as Laurel’s wife Ida) shine in their scenes, but can’t stop the film from feeling a bit shallow ultimately.

And that opening Hollywood walkabout shot aside — and even that’s hampered by some crudely expositional dialogue and a slight air of fakery that belies the film’s British production — the usually talented Baird feels like he’s doing very anonymous work here and the movie is so laser targeted on the grey-dollar audience it’s aimed at that it almost feels condescending. It all ends up feeling a bit TV movie-ish (it wasn’t shocking to learn after the screening that the film actually began as precisely that before getting the big-screen upgrade), and as well as the stars acquit themselves, it never quite makes the argument for Laurel & Hardy’s brilliance either.

It’s not a terrible time at the movies, but after Coogan & Pope’s previous collaboration on “Philomena” proved to be such a genuinely satisfying example of this kind of drama, it’s hard not to feel like there’s something of a missed opportunity here, a film truly deserving of the excellent performances at its centre. [C+]

“Stan & Ollie” goes into limited release in the U.S. on December 28th via Sony Pictures Classics.

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