Movie Review Stan & Ollie

Stan & Ollie (2018)

Directed by Jon S. Baird

Written by Jeff Pope

Starring John C. Reilly, Steve Coogan, Shirley Henderson, Nina Arianda, Danny Huston

Release Date December 28th, 2018

Published December 26th, 2018

Stan & Ollie is a late addition to my best of the year list. This wonderful film chronicling the final tour of the legendary comedy duo Laurel & Hardy is funny and poignant without ever becoming cloying or pushy. Steve Coogan and John C Reilly beautifully capture the history and the strain between the two great friends and partners as they attempt to salvage one last bit of glory before the spotlight fades for good.

In 1954, having not made a movie together in 15 years, Laurel & Hardy reunited for a tour of England in hopes of getting a movie project off the ground with an English producer. Things don’t get off to an auspicious start as their tour manager, Delfont (Rufus Jones) books them a run down hotel and a small theater that they are unable to sell out. Worse yet, the producer of their proposed film project won’t take Stan’s calls.

Things become so dire that it appears as if the tour will be cut short as ticket sales lag. Meanwhile, we cut to the back story of what led to their break up 15 years earlier. Danny Huston portrays legendary producer Hal Roach, the man who put the duo together and brought them to the big screen. While Ollie is content with their arrangement, Stan, who once partnered with Charlie Chaplin before his days in the movies, wants to make more money.

With Stan’s contract up, he’s managed to book a deal with Fox but only for Laurel & Hardy, not just for himself. The deal fell through when Ollie decided to remain with Hal Roach and even made a movie, Zenobia, without his long time partner. Zenobia wasn’t a hit and for more than a decade both men’s careers foundered. We don’t know what brought them back together but a payday in England appears to have been the reason.

Even still, the two have a tremendous stage act that we get glimpses of and those glimpses are hysterically funny. As the story progresses, the two begin to do press for the tour and eventually the tour begins to gain ground and sell out shows. Naturally, old tensions come back into light and the tour is thrown into chaos when it appears that Hardy’s health won’t allow him to continue.

Stan & Ollie was directed by Jon S Baird whose previous film, Filth, starring James McAvoy, is quite a departure from the gentle and sweet poignance of Stan & Ollie. Nevertheless, Baird does a tremendous job keeping a good pace and with cinematographer Laurie Rose, he’s crafted not just a funny movie, but quite a beautiful movie. Credit also goes to prosthetics makeup designer Mark Coulier for turning the lanky Mr Reilly seamlessly into the corpulent Mr Hardy.

I would be remiss if I didn’t also praise screenwriter Jeff Pope who worked from the book Laurel & Hardy: The British Tours by A.J Marriott. The dialogue, though mostly inferred, feels real, dynamic, and authentic. The lovely recreations of the Laurel & Hardy performances are wonderful but it is the private moments that resonate deeply, especially a near break up scene that plays as comedy for those who can’t hear the deeply hurtful things the two say to one another.

And then, of course, there are the two incredible performances at the center of the film. John C Reilly has earned both a Golden Globe and a Critics Choice Award nomination for his performance as Oliver Hardy and both are much deserved. Reilly, even under pounds of prosthetics finds the heart of Oliver Hardy in lovely fashion. He appears to have been a lovely man and while the film likely shaves the edges off of all of these characters, this is a lovely way to remember these men.

Steve Coogan in many ways has a much harder performance. Stan Laurel played the fool in many of the Laurel & Hardy movies, bumbling his friend into one silly bit of nonsense after another, but behind the scenes, Laurel was a force to be reckoned with. Laurel wrote much of the duo's routines for stage and screen and was even deferred to by many directors for how to film those routines, though he never earned a directors credit.

Coogan movingly captures the pain and frustration that made Stan Laurel so driven and yet so kind. He wasn’t wrong to want to get the duo more money, they were rather underpaid given their success, and it is a fine tribute to the man that he never stopped fighting for the recognition that he felt they both deserved, but especially for the endless hours of work he put in to make them so successful.

Stan & Ollie is a wonderful movie, a true crowd pleaser. It’s a movie that fans and friends and family of the legendary duo can be proud of. Yes, they had their petty differences and egotism but at the heart, they were showmen and dedicated friends. Stan & Ollie is the kind of tribute these two men deserve after so many years of being under-recognized behind contemporaries such The Marx Brothers, Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin and the copycats who came after such as Abbott & Costello and, to a lesser extent, Martin & Lewis.

Movie Review The Humbling

The Humbling (2015) 

Directed by Barry Levinson 

Written by Buck Henry 

Starring Al Pacino, Greta Gerwig, Dianne Wiest, Nina Arianda, Charles Grodin, Kyra Sedgwick 

Release Date January 23rd, 2015 

Published January 17th, 2015 

The crazed, narcissistic, sexist, ludicrousness of "The Humbling" almost needs to be seen to be believed. I say “almost” because I really don't want you to waste your precious time watching this dreadful movie. Al Pacino has been wandering in the cinematic woods for years now. While he surrounds himself with talented people in "The Humbling," each is defeated equally by the film. Based on the novel by Phillip Roth, "The Humbling" stars Al Pacino as washed-up actor Simon Axler. Simon is beginning to lose his mind. On stage one night, in front of a disinterested crowd, Simon takes a header into the orchestra pit and winds up in a mental institution. 

Despite his tendency to share his narcissistic rambling with anyone, the talking cure doesn't seem to be working. Nevertheless, after 30 days Simon heads back to his empty mansion in Connecticut to recuperate. There, Simon is joined inexplicably by Pegeen (Greta Gerwig). Pegeen explains that she is the daughter of Simon’s old acting friends. Because she had a crush on him when she was 11, she says, she'd like to give up being a lesbian and be with him. This is, despite his impoverished living situation, his inability to work, and the fact that he is 66 years old and slowly losing his mind.

Here, director Barry Levinson and Pacino might have found a believable direction for "The Humbling" if they they followed through on Pegeen being a figment of Simon's imagination. There is briefly a hint that she's not real and if that had been the direction of the story, maybe the film would not be completely horrible. Instead, the film doubles down on the Pegeen character, rendering her the picture of a sexist fantasy and feminist nightmares. With Pegeen comes a series of reductive caricatures of women including not one, but two, stalker ex-girlfriends. One of them (Billy Porter) is now a man. The other one  is Louise (Kyra Sedgwick), whom Pegeen claims to have slept with in order to get her job as a university professor. I really wish I was making all of this up, but I am not.

Pegeen's arrival at Simon's home is among the more bizarre series of scenes in any movie in 2014. Pegeen arrives, introduces herself and then angrily begins to explain who she is. Why is she angry? Apparently it’s because Simon gave her a ring when she was 11 years old and she thought it meant they were married. It's impossible to tell if this dialogue is meant as a joke, because Greta Gerwig plays the scene with a bizarre, haughty intensity that doesn't fit the scene if it is indeed intended as a joke. It probably should be funny but it is most certainly not. 

That scene somehow ends in a kiss between Pegeen and Simon which is as creepy and awkward as you would imagine between 66 year old Al Pacino and a much, much, much younger woman. Then Simon and Pegeen begin playing with a toy train. Again, all of this is played straight, as if nothing remarkable or unusual has happened. A lesbian has just switched gender preference to be with a man old enough to be her grandfather and now they are playing with toy trains. That sounds like someone describing a fever dream.

The Humbling somehow manages to get weirder and more repellent. "The Humbling" contains a subplot in which a woman named Sybil (Nina Arianda), whom Simon met while he was committed to the asylum, (funny joke, right? Sybil in a mental hospital), Sybil wants Simon to kill her husband. After Simon is released from the hospital, Sybil stalks him and continues to try to hire him to kill her husband. Why? Because in "The Humbling" all women are completely insane.

Oh, but wait dear reader, director Barry Levinson and writer Buck Henry  he film have a cop-out for all of this sexist bullshit on display: Simon is an unreliable narrator. Simon may be suffering from Alzheimer’s or a more simple form of age-related memory loss. As he narrates the story, he can't remember it well. He talks to Pegeen when she's not there. He may be inventing all of this story or none of it. "The Humbling" is a grand, disturbed, mess of a movie that inspires bafflement over those involved in its creation. The once great Levinson continues his 17-year run of terrible films and takes the once-great screenwriter Buck Henry down with him. Henry hadn't had a screenplay credit in 19 years (his sharp wit last crafted the Nicole Kidman movie "To Die For"). He should have remained retired.

Greta Gerwig, Kyra Sedgwick, Dianne Wiest, who plays Gerwig's mother in the film, and the wonderful Charles Grodin also get dragged down into the muck of Pacino's continuing decline. I can't imagine what each of these fine performers thought that they were getting into in "The Humbling," but I am sure they cannot be happy with the outcome. Repeatedly throughout the film, Simon goes meta and muses about how people only want to see him return to the stage to watch the freak, the car wreck in progress. I doubt Pacino recognizes this musing as a commentary on his own career. But indeed there is only that reason to watch a Pacino movie these days. I keep watching Pacino in part because it is my job and in part because I just don't think it can get any worse, and then it does.

"The Humbling" is the latest rock bottom for the once-great Pacino.