Since childhood, I’m a passionate fan of the Laurel and Hardy films. They were among the few who were not censored in Communist Romania where I grew up, and we could enjoy a healthy and non-ideological laugh. The pleasure and the feeling of freshness remained intact when I watched them again after ten, thirty or fifty years. I’m afraid, however, that this comic viewing pleasure raises the expectations for any film that has the couple as heroes, even when it’s a biopic that refers to the late years of their common career, like ‘Stan & Ollie‘ directed by Jon S. Baird. The risk of being disappointed is hard to avoid.
Movies about aging cinema stars are enough to represent a sub-genre of the ‘movies about movies’ genre. Some of them were memorable. Let’s remember ‘Sunset Blvd.‘ or about Fellini‘s ‘Ginger and Fred‘. ‘Stan & Ollie‘ is trying to walk along the same path, documenting the tentative to return to stages and screens of the two actors, more than a decade after their split, as the began to catch with them and the tastes of the public had changed. Laurel (Stan – Steve Coogan) and Hardy (Ollie – John C. Reilly) are a couple, a couple which has gone through a crisis and trying to get back to what they were, to reestablish the flame of humor and friendship between them. It is both a story about cinema and a story about a relationship, complicated by the presence of wives and the producer, who all play significant roles in their lives.
The problem is that we are dealing with a sad story about two people whose job was to make us laugh, and who probably were nice and funny persons, playing somehow their screen roles roles in real life. The film mixes a number of gags in the style of the films with the two comedians with a melodramatic story that has a known ending. None of the two threads is convincing. The comic part is not cruel enough, it does not go as far as the movies in which the two acted. The melodrama is predictable and superficial. The acting performances are remarkable, especially John C. Reilly‘s, an actor who has played some outstanding roles in recent years. It is not enough. ‘Stan & Ollie‘ is a nice biopic that demands respect for the two actors, but it does not bring anything new to those who have loved their movies and is of course not representative for those who did not know them. I would rather recommend watching or watching again their original films.