Stan and Ollie

Were they ever really funny?  This is the most troubling question posed by Jon Baird's 2019 Stan and Ollie.  On the evidence of this movie, containing lovingly detailed recreations of Laurel and Hardy "bits", the comedy duo's gags were always more disturbing than funny, Kakaesque loops in which simple tasks become inexplicably difficult, protracted, subject to dream-like delays and obstructions -- when I saw this film in Edina, no one in the audience laughed at anything in the picture.  (Samuel Beckett is said to have claimed that the duo in Waiting for Godot was modeled on Laurel and Hardy.) The funereal silence enveloping the hall made me feel uncomfortable and, even, a bit ashamed.

Stan and Ollie documents a tour of British theaters that Laurel and Hardy undertook, probably around 1953 or 1957.  (The movie is based upon a non-fiction book about the tour.)  Out of date and unappreciated in the United States, Stan and Ollie traveled to England, reprising some of their most famous scenes from the movies made with Hal Roach in the thirties that had made them international stars.  The tour was supposed to be coordinated with meetings with British film producers in support of a new movie project, a parody of the Robin Hood stories written by Stan Laurel, the creative brains behind the duo.  Financing isn't available for the movie and Laurel is treated shabbily by a studio executive who refuses to meet with him.  However, the tour, commencing with tiny crowds in remote towns, becomes wildly successful, possibly because Laurel and Hardy consent to appear in a series of publicity stunts aimed at promoting their shows.  They play packed houses in London.  This turns out to be too exhausting for Oliver ("Babe") Hardy who collapses with congestive heart failure.  Although it's pretty clear that he is dying, Hardy performs with Laurel one last time on the London stage -- he does the famous dance ("Commence to dancin' , Commence to prancin'") from Way out West.  A closing title tells us that Hardy died in 1957 and that Laurel lived another decade, continuing to write comedy routines for the duo that had ceased to exist with Ollie's death. 

This sort of material is sentimental in a necrophile way, and, more than a bit morbid.  Stan is played by the British comedian Steven Coogan and Ollie is impersonated by John C. Reilly wearing a complicated prosthetic fat suit -- both actors are excellent and, at times, their resemblance to the famous clowns seems uncanny.  The emotional trajectory of the film is supplied by Stan's anger that Ollie "betrayed" him in the mid-thirties by making a film alone -- it's called "the elephant film" in this movie (actually the 1939 film Zenobia).  Stan was renegotiating his contract with Hal Roach, portrayed as a loudmouthed bully in this picture.  Ollie was under contract and, when Stan refused to perform, felt obliged to work with Roach on the "the elephant movie" -- something for which Stan has never forgiven Ollie.  The men's relationship is complicated by their wives -- Ollie has a minuscule dame for his wife:  she's got a high-pitched voice that could shatter glass.  Stan is married to a mercenary Russian dancer who once performed, she proudly repeats to others, for Preston Sturges.  The women are also interesting, do a good job with their roles, and add some additional emotional grist to the mill -- both of them, of course, are fierce partisans for each of their husbands, thus creating additional conflict between the two men.  The film begins in 1936 on the set of Way out West with the famous dance in front of the saloon (at the height of their fame, Stan tells Ollie he has rented a boat to cruise to Catalina and Clark Gable and Carole Lombard will be in attendance) -- the picture also features a reprise of Oliver and Stan's wonderful duet "On the Trail of the Lonesome Pine."  Throughout the picture, the film makes allusions to some of the famous comedy bits that the boys performed in earlier movies -- including a scene involving references to the Oscar winning two-reeler "The Music Box."  Stan and Ollie are always "on" -- that is, they seem to think it is their duty to entertain casual onlookers with "bits" and gags.  It's somewhat sad and not funny at all.  For me, the film has strong nostalgic appeal -- I was raised with these skits since my father was a great admirer of the comedians.  For twenty-five years, my father (the son of a Lutheran minister) skipped church to watch old Laurel and Hardy movies over and over again on Sunday mornings.  The movie has good production values and is handsomely mounted and contains many scenes that will cause admirers of the comedians to "tear up", but I wonder for whom the picture was made -- how many fans do Laurel and Hardy have today?  In my experience, very few women ever found the boys' antics amusing and the strange homosexual undertones to their many of their scenes probably disturbed those few females who sat through Laurel and Hardy's pictures.  Modern audiences, I assume, will regard the "slow-burn" gags as too protracted and tedious -- this is how I experienced them myself forty years ago watching the murky-looking movies on TV with my father.  The picture seems made for a "Sons of the  Desert" fan club that has long since ceased to exist.  That said, the picture is emotionally satisfying, in effect, a story of forgiveness narrated in the context of a long and complex marriage -- that is, the intimate relationship between the two comedians.  (When Ollie says that he is cold after his heart attack, Stan climbs into bed to warm him -- an understated gestures that is nonetheless intensely moving, particularly in the context of a viewer recalling the many scenes in their movies featuring the two men sharing the same bed.)  In the penultimate sequence, Stan and Ollie do something called the "double door gag" -- this involves the two comics searching for one another when one has entered one door and the other another door:  the gag begins with befuddlement and, then, moves into surrealism:  the geometry of the set requires that the men encounter one another back stage, behind the double doors, but, somehow, they keep missing one another; space and time are warped -- they wander on the stage, exposed to the audience, with their backs to each other, oblivious that the other man is only a few inches away.   The scene goes on for a long time and parts of it are shot in slow motion and there is a genuine sense of confusion and, even, growing panic as the gag goes on and on without the two men coming face to face notwithstanding their increasingly desperate search.  It's disturbing, symbolic of something like the onset of dementia, and, of course, raises the question with which I began:  Was this stuff ever really funny?   The director cheats with lots of audience reaction shots -- everyone is laughing uproariously.  But no one was laughing in the theater in which I saw the movie.