Ever since the trailer came out for Stan & Ollie, I've been asked incessantly if I've seen it or the film and as a lifelong lover of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, what I think of this motion picture. Saturday evening, I attended a screening at the Writers Guild so here is what I think of this motion picture.
The art direction, design and cinematography are superb. I can't think of a film that has ever done a better job of re-creating the world of a time gone by.
I also can't think of a film about well-known personalities that did a better job of making you think you were watching the real people. Folks are especially raving about John C. Reilly as Mr. Hardy but I was more impressed with Steve Coogan as Mr. Laurel. I thought he had the tougher role in playing more of a multi-layered character plus I thought the make-up/prosthetics job on Reilly did a lot of the heavy lifting in that performance.
The make-up was real impressive and certainly Oscar-worthy because it didn't look like make-up. Usually, Billy Crystal playing a much older man looks to me like Billy Crystal with a lot of stuff on his face.
Beyond that, I really, really disliked this movie.
I went in wanting to love it. Honest, I did. And I really expected to because so many friends of mine who adore The Boys have expressed their delight in it. (How to know if someone's really a fan of them: They speak of "Stan and Babe," Babe being Hardy's nickname.)
Leonard Maltin, a lover of Stan and Babe if ever there was one, even started his review with "I love this movie!" and reviews don't get any more approving than that. I rarely disagree much with my pal Leonard but I suspect we'll be mudwrestling over this one for the rest of our lives or our friendship, whichever ends first.
Before I get into detail about why I didn't like the film, I'm going to post one of these…
Okay now. First off, I need to say something and this is not the reason I didn't like the movie but it has something to do with it. A lot of the actual history of Laurel and Hardy has been rewritten and fictionalized. Here are but a few examples…
Laurel did not resent Hardy making a movie without him in 1939. They did not have a great offer from Twentieth-Century Fox in 1939 which Hardy refused to sign then. Their popularity did not decline as rapidly as the film makes out. Their final trip overseas, which is what the movie is mainly about, was not the fiasco the film makes it out to be. And I don't know if the movie makes it clear but that was their third UK tour and they were all pretty successful.
The tour promoter, Bernard Delfont, was not the inept con artist that the film makes him out to be, just as their old studio boss Hal Roach was not the angry tyrant that he was portrayed to be. (Even Leonard had a problem with the depiction of Roach.) Hardy did suffer a mild heart attack on the third tour and it resulted in the truncation of that tour. It did not result in Hardy promising his wife he would retire. Therefore, it also did not result in him breaking that promise, ignoring his doctor's orders and resuming the tour, even refusing to drop the strenuous dance routine.
I'm aware I'm one of the few people who did not like this film. Am I also one of the few who did not take that as a gloriously happy ending? To me, a happy ending might have been for Hardy to offer to continue the tour and for Stan to say to him, "I love you for that, Babe, but it's more important that you keep living than for us to do ten more cities and entertain a few thousand more people. You need to be there for Lucille…and hey, if your health returns, maybe we can make another movie or two." But instead in the ending, Stan seems quite pleased that his dear friend — the one who just had the heart attack and was ordered to stop performing — is up there, dancing his severely injured heart out.
In real life, what did happen was that Hardy went home, got better and the two of them were days from the commencement of shooting on a new film when Laurel had a stroke that ended both their performing careers.
But like I said, it isn't just the rewriting of history that bothers me. I mentioned some of it because I think it's significant that the filmmakers had to change so much reality in order to gin up a tale of Stan and Oliver fighting. There wasn't a real one that they could use so they came up with something that I'm afraid just did not ring emotionally true to me. I don't think it would even if I knew very little of the truth.
Two guys who've been together that long…fighting over those silly things? I'd hate to think they were really that shallow. Or married to women that annoying. Hardy was married three times. Laurel was married to four different women and one of them, he married and divorced twice, plus there was also a common law spouse before the four legal ones. If the wives depicted in the film were anything like their real-life counterparts, I think Stan and Babe each needed one more divorce.
This is a movie about two of the most beloved, successful comedians of all time. There's not nearly enough of that in the film. If you didn't know going in that the unsuccessful-at-first tour was a minor outlier in their careers, I don't think you'd figure it out from this movie. Or get what was beloved about them. The real guys had an innocence that made you love them. I don't think it's missing in the acting. I think it's missing in the story that the filmmakers chose to tell. It's Stan and Babe at their lowest point, told in a way that makes it lower so that we can get to a happy ending which I found more bizarre than happy.
Coogan and Reilly are astounding at looking like and sounding like the genuine articles but I found myself thinking, "Oh, I hope Stan and Babe weren't really like that." Stan's a bit of a dick in the film. Babe lacks the off-screen likability that every single person who knew the real thing said he had. (Hal Roach, portrayed wrongly as a bad guy in this picture, told me "Hardy made everyone smile everywhere he went." Reilly's Hardy doesn't.)
Since I saw the picture, I've spoken with several fellow L&H lovers who are aghast at my reaction. Some said, "Yeah, yeah, but isn't it great seeing them getting all this attention?" or "Maybe this will cause a new generation to discover their films?" Maybe…but that doesn't change anything about what I didn't like in the film. It's just a reason to perhaps tolerate it.
The last movie I saw that disappointed me while delighting many (not all) of my friends was Saving Mr. Banks. Shortly after I wrote here of my feelings, I ran into Richard Sherman who, of course, was a player in the story it told and an enthusiastic approver of the film. He said to me with amazement, "You really didn't like it? Why not?" I asked him, "How did you like spending weeks of your life with that woman?" He said, "I hated it." I said, "Okay. You didn't like spending a couple of weeks with her and I didn't like spending a couple of hours with her."
Mr. Sherman thought for a second and said, "You've got a point." I didn't like spending a couple of hours — it felt like more than it was — watching my two favorite performers at the ass-end of their careers wherein they created glorious work that will live forever, bickering and struggling through a quickly-forgotten tour. I am not out to change anyone's love for this film and I can see there's plenty of that around. But I've been inundated by folks asking me what I thought of it so I just told you what I thought of it. Perhaps some of them will consider that I have a point.