Laurel says he did all the creative work and was repaid by a lack of loyalty, while Hardy cuts even deeper, calling his longtime partner a hollow man fueled by jealousy for Charlie Chaplin.
Such nods to their comic triumphs are few, and as the cracks in their relationship begin to show, the movie builds to a major blowup between the two in a party scene when they exhume old grievances and fight like bitter siblings. There are a few knowing jokes, such as when Laurel and Hardy push a trunk up stairs, in an echo of their famous comic bit from “The Music Box,” in which they move a piano, but this time, when it slips out of their hands, Hardy just stares at the fallen object at the bottom of the stairs and says: “Do we really need that trunk?” Once they go offstage, they have chemistry - but it’s complicated.īoth men had difficult relationships with women, which are alluded to, but not explored in any complexity, though Nina Arianda makes a meal out of a snack, playing the formidable Russian wife of Laurel, perpetually skeptical of the comics’ promoter, Bernard Delfont (a wonderfully oily Rufus Jones).īut the focus here never strays far from the prickly friendship at its center. Doing their gentle dance routines or farcical double-door bits, they are perfect together.
Baird’s observant and genial portrait includes many scenes where these master comics are performing, but the primary purpose doesn’t appear to be to convince you of their comic genius, but rather to display their ease with each other, the charge and excitement of a connection. (They are on a theater tour to raise money for a film comeback.) Like a married couple that stopped fighting long ago, their exchanges hint at buried resentments, muffled irritations and an abiding love. Portraying the final days of the remarkable partnership of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, the greatest double act in the history of movies, the tightly focused narrative finds these comedians past their prime, not just in their career but also in their relationship. Replace flirtation and sex with pratfalls and comic repartee and “Stan & Ollie” is a heartstrings-yanking Hollywood romance.