Stan & Ollie (2018)

Stan & Ollie arrives as a modest elegy for two men who spent their lives falling over furniture, and it has no ambitions beyond the personal. Steve Coogan and John C. Reilly do the hard work of imitation, and the film watches them tour the British provinces in 1953, playing half-empty halls while a producer's attention drifts elsewhere. The camera stays close. The interest is in the silences between the routines, in the way a partnership outlives the affection that supposedly sustains it.

The film's one glancing grievance concerns money and contracts. Stan wants to leave Hal Roach and control his own work; Ollie will not rock a comfortable boat. Sixteen years later the resentment surfaces at a party, and the argument that follows is the film's best scene. It is a complaint about an industry that treats its artists as inventory, which is a real thing and an old one. The film keeps it personal. There is no systemic indictment here, no broader anger at the arrangement of capital, only two men nursing an old wound over drinks.

Everything else is tribute. The wives, played with sturdy good humour by Shirley Henderson and Nina Arianda, are supportive and sharp, and the film grants them a private hand squeeze that says more than any speech. It does not ask them to carry an argument. Nor does the film reach for a larger social program. The history is rearranged for dramatic convenience, which is standard biopic housekeeping and not an ideological rewrite. Laurel and Hardy never actually quarrelled, and the film quarrels on their behalf. That is sentiment, not sermonizing. The result is a warm, well-acted, entirely untroubling picture about two funny men growing old, and the pleasure it takes in them is sincere.