Anyone who’s been to London with even the merest of touristic impulses is
probably familiar with England’s famed “blue plaques.” These are the
approximately one thousand markers plastered on buildings in and around
London that let passersby know where great personages of the British past
walked, slept, were born or otherwise went about the mundane business of
living, or where a selection of “great events” in English life took place.
If you’re ever on Brixton Road in Kensington, keep an eye out for the
plaque declaring 15 Glenshaw Mansions the place where Charlie Chaplin
“lived… in Flat 15” from 1908 to 1910. Find yourself stranded on Sydenham
Hill Road? Make sure to take in the exterior of the Fountain House at #17, where Francis Petit Smith, a “Pioneer of the Screw Propeller,” drew breath from 1864 to 1870. And so on.
I’ve come to view the logo for BBC Films as something like a blue English
Heritage plaque–a marker that I’m in the vicinity of something culturally
worthy from which the living element has most likely fled. Hollywood movies
frequently seem as if they’ve been made by a committee of robot bankers.
BBC Films can feel authored by Victorian curators, and not because they
believed in the project *per se,* but because it fits into a schematic
locked away in a dusty drawer somewhere having to do with British cultural
hegemony or some other antique notion like that.
Hence the new BBC Films presentation STAN & OLLIE, a movie about the
revered British/American doubles act of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, as
viewed through the melancholy lens of their final live tour of British
musical halls in the early 1950s. You have to work pretty hard to give me
any reservations at all about a movie like this one–I’m a sucker for both
classic comedy teams and silent comedy, and Laurel and Hardy are probably
(along with Chaplin and Peter Sellers) my favorite movie comedians of all
time.
But my God what a lush and passionless wax museum of a picture director Jon
S. Baird and producer Faye Ward have assembled around comedy’s greatest of
greats–a film where even the seediest hotel or the most second rate
theatrical venue gleams like it’s covered in buttercream frosting.
The ossified “tradition of quality” approach is unfortunate in most any
circumstance, but especially so here. Because Laurel and Hardy were
anarchists, not classicists. As hilarious as their comedy was, it made a
statement similar to Keaton’s, which is that the world is a machine and
it’s aimed at your head. That’s why Laurel’s weeping idiot, who would have
been the patsy and the victim in any other team’s comedy, mostly walks
between the raindrops in their films, while Hardy as the self-perceived
alpha male and order giver always ends up at the bottom of a ten foot deep
puddle of mud.
The fool in the world of L & H is the one who believes the cruel chaos of
living can be controlled and managed. The weeping idiot takes life as it
comes, and in that he is wise.
Anarchy and chaos are alien concepts to a movie which mostly views Laurel
and Hardy as a failing business partnership. The few attempts to reference
their comedy in a real world context (as when a large trunk they’re
carrying in a railway station tumbles down a long flight of stairs like the
piano in their Oscar-winning short THE MUSIC BOX) fall so entirely flat
you’re not even sure if they’re being played for laughs. This is despite
stunning and self-effacing character work from Steve Coogan as Laurel and
John C. Reilly as Hardy–two actor’s comedians who avoid caricature
completely, infusing their creations with respect and love for sure, but
most critically with nuance and life.
Almost all of the funny stuff in this movie comes from Nina Arianda and
Shirley Henderson as Ida and Lucille, Laurel and Hardy’s bickering and
possessive wives. Relieved of the burden of portraying Great Men of the
British Comic Tradition, Arianda and Henderson let loose in a slow rolling
verbal catfight that is all the funnier because it’s constrained by a
commercially mandated veneer of social camaraderie, and underpinned by each
character’s obvious and unquestioning support for the man she loves.
A few observers have remarked on the odd but intriguing choice of depicting
the end of Laurel and Hardy’s career rather than a story set in its prime.
I’d like to believe this was a novel storytelling approach selected to find
a new angle on a historical story. But I suspect it has to do also with the
fact that not one foot of film was shot by Laurel and Hardy in Britain,
outside of their appearances in newsreels. They were an American movie
phenomenon that took over the rest of the world, and they worked and died
virtually exclusively in that most un-British of places: Southern
California.
The music hall coda to their impoverished old age is therefore the only
British incident in their long performing history.
In other words, it was the only place to hang the plaque.