Love and Ruin Worthwhile, but Flat

LOVE AND RUIN (2018)

By Paula McLain

Penguin Random House, 432 pages

★★★

Novelist Paula McLain has been on a quest to write about intrepid women. For Circling the Sun, her subject was Beryl Markham; in The Paris Wife, it was Hadley Richardson, Ernest Hemingway’s first wife (1921-27), who introduced the then little-known writer to important literary figures. Love and Ruin could be considered a sequel to Love and Ruin, except Hemingway had a second marriage to Pauline Pfeiffer (1927-40) before he hooked up with Martha Gellhorn, his third wife (1940-45) and the main subject of McLain’s latest novel.

 Hemingway was a difficult man: reckless, egoistic, bullying, and demanding. He was sometimes referred to as a man’s man and was most comfortable in the company of fawning comrades. He was also insecure in many ways and whenever he shed one wife, he quickly remarried. (When he divorced Gellhorn in 1945, he married correspondent Mary Welsh the next year and stayed with her until his suicide in 1961.)

McLain’s take on “Marty” Gellhorn is that “Papa” Hemingway didn’t like competition! He was already famous when he met Gellhorn in 1937 and convinced her to travel to Spain to report on the Spanish Civil War. This took some finagling, as Gellhorn was a relative unknown at the time. She soon proved her mettle as correspondent and mistress. Both she and Hemingway ran on adrenaline, and one might conclude that in Hemingway’s case, a mistress fit him better. Although Hemingway initially encouraged Gellhorn’s writing, he tried to make her into a doting wife who’d play hostess at his Finca Vigia homestead in Cuba, where he entertained drinking buddies and hangers-on. In McLain’s telling, Gellhorn simply wasn’t cut from domestic cloth. Although she was with Hemingway when he completed his masterpiece, For Whom the Bell Tolls, he became increasingly jealous of Gellhorn’s assignments during World War II. (He was also an alcoholic and irresponsible with money.)

Gellhorn is the heroine of Love and Ruin, but an imperfect one. It took her a few years to realize that she could not have it all: marriage, career, domesticity, and respect. We see her struggle to be taken seriously on her own terms, not as Ernest Hemingway’s wife. McLain's Gellhorn seesaws between conformity in one moment and a lioness on the hunt for what she wants the next. This made her as complicated and contradictory as Hemingway. It also made it impossible to sustain her marriage. For his part, it’s hard to determine which flowed more freely in Hemingway, testosterone or booze. Like Gellhorn, McLain shows him as a volatile mix of fragility and fierce independence. Mostly, though, Hemingway’s ego only allowed women to shine in his reflected glow.

McLain’s sprawling novel takes us from Key West and Cuba to Madrid, Finland, and Germany. In some ways, it’s about two people seeking unconditional love who spend much of their time setting conditions. The relationship only worked when Papa and Marty were in the midst of danger and on the move. The title says it all: love and ruin. No one will ever write a book about either figure titled Stasis and Happiness.

I am a big fan of McLain’s novels and love the idea that she puts strong women at the center of her tales. Yet despite the fact that Love and Ruin features two powerful and fascinating characters, it’s not up to McLain’s usual standards. It’s a good book and worth a read, but it feels flat in ways that are hard to describe. Perhaps the very thought of a sustainable relationship between these two individuals is so absurd that that we feel what must happen long before McLain describes it. How does one explain abortive domesticity without taming two individuals whose very natures rebel against that ideal? Would we believe it were we treated to moments of mundane wedded bliss? McLain gives us a woman who ultimately refused to be either a goddess or a victim, but once we know this, the rest of the story is telegraphed.

I seldom feel this way about historical figures, but for once I favor a film over a novel. The 2012 movie Hemingway & Gellhorn–with Clive Owen and Nicole Kidman in the title roles­–tells the same story as McLain’s book, but we have visuals to flesh out the details and provide a dramatic backdrop. I wouldn’t call Love and Ruin a misstep–McLain is too good a writer–but I did find it less than the sum of its parts.

Rob Weir

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The Witch Elm Worthwhile but not a Tana French Gem

The Witch Elm (2108)

By Tana French

Penguin/Random House, 528 pages.

★★★

Toby Hennessy has it all: education, supportive parents, charm, good looks, a cool PR job with an avant-garde Dublin art gallery, snarky BFFs, and a sweet girlfriend named Melissa who adores him. He's an only child, but his first cousins Susannah and Leon are like siblings to him. Maybe. Everyone loves Toby. Maybe. But one night he is beaten by burglars and suffers some pretty major physical injuries, including a concussion that leaves big memory gaps. Doctors tell him that he'll recover most of his memory. Maybe.

The Witch Elm is about lots of maybes, as in possible scenarios based upon what is remembered and forgotten. One thing that's for sure is that Toby isn't going to work soon. But being the lucky guy he is, he can get away from the bad vibes of his burgled apartment by retreating to Ivy Hall, a grand-if-dowdy suburban family home occupied by his beloved uncle Hugo. Hugo is the prototype of an eccentric bachelor, and he certainly indulged Toby, Su, and Leon as kids and adolescents. The sad note is that Hugo is dying of cancer, so Toby and Melissa settle in to help him, mostly with meals and his genealogy studies as he's a resourceful old coot otherwise.

Things get hairy when one of Su's kids finds a human skull while climbing in the giant wych elm* in the walled-in yard. Detectives soon discover an entire skeleton inside a hollow section of the tree. No such luck that it's ancient; it belongs to an old friend of Toby's named Dominic. How can that be? Dominic allegedly committed suicide by throwing himself into the sea a decade earlier, and Toby went to his memorial service. What ensues is like Edgar Allen Poe's "The Telltale Heart" crossed with The Girl on the Train.

Tana French is (rightly) famous for her Irish detective novels, but The Witch Elm focuses on those caught up in the middle of what might be a murder investigation. Toby's memory is muddled, but he remembers liking Dominic, though they weren't "friend friends," as he relates to investigator Mike Rafferty. He was just another spirited guy in the pack of young adults who hung out at Hugo's house. Except Toby's benign view of Dominic doesn't match that of Su, Leon, Toby's friends, or others who all say he was an absolute monster. How can Toby's memory be so different? Was he oblivious? Is his concussion rearranging reality? Or is it PTSD for his own misdeeds? Rafferty regards Toby as a suspect, but he's pretty sure he could never do anything like this. But there are those memory gaps…. Maybe he should consider that he is a murderer.

The Witch Elm is loosely based on a real (unsolved) case from England in 1944, but it's really a mind game novel. What it does well is precisely what Poe did: put us inside the terrified mind of a suspect. It is not, however, up to the quality of Ms. French's prior novels. In my view, she tried too hard to write a book relevant to #MeToo sensibilities. It may even be a backdoor slam on men. I don't know about Irish law, but in the United States, the any charges secured by of her hawkshaw Rafferty would be tossed as entrapment. Rafferty comes off as a Machiavellian bully who force-fits his inferences, but most of her male characters are loutish and crude.

The last quarter of the book seems a parallel force-fit. Melissa seems too to be true, as if French was using her as an archetype for female goodness. I give French credit for tossing a curve that I did not anticipate, but that twist ultimately rests upon acceptance of gender essentialism that I found more troubling than a skeleton in a tree.

The good news is that even a lackluster Tana French novel is smart, lively, provocative, and well paced. Like several of her other books, French probes the darker side of privilege to remind us that the label "lucky" is one too cavalierly applied. Nonetheless, The Witch Elm is a bit like its namesake tree–a rarity. In this case, it's a novel that's merely okay rather than spectacular.

Rob Weir

* The witch elm–also called a Scots elm–has nothing to do with black magic. The Old English word wych or wice means flexible in a springy sort of way. French uses it to suggest memory is elastic. 

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Tattooist of Auschwitz a Great Tale/Middling Novel

THE TATTOOIST OF AUSCHWITZ   (2018)

By Heather Morris

HarperCollins, 288 pages.

★★★

Heather Morris has written a novel about one of the most improbable love stories imaginable. Ludwig "Lale" Sokolov fell in love with Gita Furman at first sight. That's an old story, but Lale was tattooing Gita the time. Okay, so maybe that's a modern love story, but this one begins in 1942 and Lale, a Slovakian Jew, was a tätowierer at Auschwitz-Birkenau, one of the very worst of the Nazi concentration/death camps. He was the one who burned Gita's camp number into her arm.

Morris tells her tale from Lale's point of view. He, like the reader, is aware that survival in such a house of horrors is something of a crapshoot, but he does his best to improve his odds. The Nazis find him useful, as he is multilingual. As it transpires, he's also crafty. Once he gains access to some of the camp's areas off-limits to most prisoners, he is able to secret away jewels. These he trades with Polish day workers for all manner of goods, including food. He is so good at this that even a few SS guards call upon him to procure items. He also cultivates friendships with the Roma housed in Auschwitz, and with many of the some 300,000 Hungarian Jews that passed through. In today's terms, we might call Lale a "fixer" who makes sure that Gita, her friends, and as many others as possible don't starve or succumb to diseases. He also carries on a carnal love affair with Gita in the camp, a very dangerous thing indeed. He vows they will marry when they leave the camp, a pledge Gita and almost everyone else finds unlikely. To stay alive, Lale must walk a tightrope between doing just enough for others so that they know him to be a good person and don't expose him, yet not so much that his smuggling is exposed. He also needs to avoid the monstrous Dr. Joseph Mengele as much as he possibly can and play a subservient role when he cannot.

Although the Lale/Gita love story is compelling, in many ways Lale's networks are more so.  World War II narratives often shortchange the Roma (aka/ "gypsies," a now problematic term), but some 23,000 perished during the war, as did an estimated 2 million non-Jewish Poles. Morris gives us a sense of how each group was treated in the camp. To some extent, the Nazis were less brutal to the educated Lale than to Roma and Poles. To be blunt about it, a good tätowierer was harder to replace, though Mengele did castrate one of Lale's colleagues. We also gain insight into how camp networks developed and functioned.

This is not Hogan's Heroes, though. It's not even Roberto Benigni's Life is Beautiful. Auschwitz is presented as it was: a den of monstrosity and torture. One of the raps against the novel is that Morris did not make Auschwitz-Birkenau worse than she did. I'd call that fair criticism. In fact, it would be easy to read this novel and dismiss it as too rosy, a love-conquers-all tale that just happens to be set in Auschwitz. Except…

Except that it's actually a memoir/novel hybrid. It is based on interviews Morris held with Ludwig "Lale" Eisenberg, the model for Sokolov. She spoke with him numerous times before his death in 2006, and he told her of things of which he had never spoken until after Gita's death in 2003. Why the delay? More than a million people died at Auschwitz. It was the very epicenter of Hitler's "Final Solution" and the site where nearly a tenth of all wartime Jewish casualties occurred. Holocaust scholars speak of "survivor's guilt," a form of PTSD that affected those lucky enough to be liberated. In Eisenberg's case, he also feared being seen as a collaborator on par with the hated kapo, Jews who were the equivalent of slave drivers who did a lot of the Nazis' dirty work in exchange for privileges such as better food and housing. Some would say Eisenberg was on that level.

It is easy to find factual flaws in Morris's novel. One scene has him smuggling penicillin to save Gita and that almost certainly could not have occurred. There are numerous other details that Holocaust experts call into question. I'll leave it to them to debate whether these were misremembered 50+ years later or were deliberately altered by Eisenberg. As a novelist, Morris should be given a degree of artistic license. Her goal, after all, is to make the reader care about her characters. She certainly does that with Lale, though Gita is less developed and often comes across as a damsel-in-distress awaiting rescue. That too may be correct, but many of Morris' female characters lack agency. In fact, sometimes it seems as if the only people in the camp who had free will (as opposed to acting with brute force) were Mengele and Lale.

It's problematic for any reviewer to criticize a book on the Holocaust. Let me simply say that I can't tell you how much of this novel is factual and how much is the product of Morris' imagination. I can say, though, that The Tattooist of Auschwitz began life as a screenplay that didn't fly. Morris then launched a Kickstarter campaign that helped her convert it into a novel. It is her first work of fiction. In that regard, the book is better imagined than written, and even then the arc is episodic rather than linear. Much of the prose is flat in the way that screenplays set scenes and it's up to the actors to infuse the dialogue with drama and color. In this case, the reader is called upon to inhabit the words.

My ultimate take is that this is a tremendous story that is competently but prosaically told. It will inform you and make you imagine what you would do under similar circumstances. I won't say there is much literary magic sprinkled upon the pages, but there's enough to keep us turning them.

Rob Weir

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Fox & Bones, Kitka, Bearfoot, Zak Trojano: New Releases

Fox and Bones, Better Land

Combine the leave-it-on-the-stage hard work of Ellis Paul, add a female voice, and mix with pop- and country-tinged folk and you’ve got an idea of what Fox and Bones sounds like. This delightful Oregon-based duo of Sarah Vitort (“Fox”) and Scott Gilmore (“Bones”) serves up music that’s optimistic, harmonically simpatico, and catchy. It seems these days that any man/woman duo draws immediate comparisons to the (now defunct) Civil Wars, which is a shame as it’s hard for most female singers to match Joy Williams. It also pigeonholes bands in inaccurate ways. Ignore those comparisons, Fox and Bones shines with its own light. The title track is a slice of hope for our troubled times. It manages to be deeply emotional and make a joyful noise despite being just two voices and a resonant guitar. “Little Animal” is a hand-clap, thick bass line treat with the wonderful line: Everything has already been said/Well, that doesn’t mean it isn’t true. The YouTube video of the song is silly, yet strangely compelling. “Welcome Home” tells of one who had lost his way, but landed well and recounts that journey in an honest warts-and-all fashion. Fox and Bones also have a new single, “Love Me Like a River,” and it’s both mysterious and come-hither carnal. This is definitely an act to catch. ★★★★

Kitka, Evening Star/Wintersongs

From Oakland comes a remarkable collection of women who sing in 18 different languages and carry endorsements from everyone from David Crosby to Garrison Keillor. Those 18 languages, by the way, include Ladino and medieval Galician. Maybe you didn’t know anyone spoke Galician in the Middle Ages. Kitka delight in teaching as well enrapturing us. Summer Burke of the Guardian said it well, “Even God stops to listen when Kitka … opens its collective mouth.” Kita truly is a collective–nine voices at last count–performing mostly a cappella music inspired by Eastern European traditions, especially those of Bulgaria. Their repertoire sometimes seems like choral singing. At the other end of the scale are ancient songs that skirt the edges of dissonance and could have been the soundtrack for creation. I listened to 22 tracks from two albums, each of them a jewel. See what you think of “Momci Koledarci,” with keening and drone from Kitka adding depth to a Bulgarian young people’s ensemble. Go with Kitka on the road as they sing one of their winter songs, “Ščo v pana khazjajna.” Their voices linger in the air like falling snow on “Alilo.” I have no idea what the lyrics to any of these might mean. I don’t need to. I agree with Summer Burke. ★★★★★

Bearfoot, Strong Water

Is there’s any doubt that bluegrass music is hotter than a banjo in a bonfire, consider that bands form in places where Kentucky-style bluegrass wouldn’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell. Like Alaska for instance, which is where Bearfoot started playing even before several of its members headed off to Eastern Tennessee State University to study. Fiddler Angela Oudean joined Bearfoot when she was just 16 and now might be the only person in the country with a BS in sociology and a minor in bluegrass! Bearfoot’s blend of grass seed contains alt.country, swing, folk, Cajun, and–courtesy of guest singer Megan McCormick–a bit of blues. “Firefly” sounds like a Heather Maloney song until Oudean turns it loose. Youthful exuberance meets breakneck playing on “Derailed;” Poison Drips” has the taste of a sweet mountain song, its title notwithstanding. I reckon the “Tuscarora” ridges look mighty puny to native Alaskans, but they give the weathered Appalachians a loving treatment. Good stuff from a rising band. ★★★★

Zak Trojano, Wolf Trees

The first time I heard Zak Trojano he washed over me in the way opening acts often do. What a difference a few years can make. The phrase, “he plays a wicked guitar” can be overused, but it fits Trojano like fingerpicks, which is what he wears when he showcases acoustic lap guitar and dark voice on “99 Ways.” His songwriting skills have also sharpened, as you’ll hear on “Kid’s Got Heart.” If you like acoustic guitar that booms and rings with dark tones, “Nowhere Shuffle” is for you. With the release of Wolf Trees Zak Trojano has come into his own. Don’t take my word for it; Chris Smither hangs out with Trojano. ★★★★

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Cold War is a Masterpiece

Cold War (2018)

Directed by Paweł Pawlikowski

Opus Films, 85 minutes, R (sexuality, brief nudity, language)

Polish with subtitles

★★★★★

We all know the story of doomed lovers Romeo and Juliet, right? How would that tale look if identity, ambition, and politics drove a wedge between them instead of their respective families? That's roughly the setup of Cold War, but anyone who reduces this film to its narrative is floating on the surface of a very deep sea. This is not a good film, it is a great one.

Cold War is set in its namesake time period, that post-World War II period which the United Sates and the Soviet Union engaged in an ideological contest for global supremacy. From their bipolar perspectives, the rest of the world's nations were client states and pawns. Poland was such a land. It was planted behind the Iron Curtain under the aegis of the Soviet Union. Though the Polish people have a long history, Poland's very borders were radically altered by the war. The film opens in 1947, when Wiktor Warshi (Tomasz Kot) and his partner Irena are field workers collecting traditional songs and dances. They have been tasked with launching a traveling showcase of costumed Polish folk culture performed by young people. Such shows were far more than Fame without the pop sheen. Rediscovering folk traditions was part and parcel of national identity creation in lands once under the boot heel of Nazi domination.

Poland certainly needed a boost, as it was a grim place for many years after the war.  Director Paweł Pawlikowski and cinematographer Łukasz Żal show this by filming in black and white. There are languorous establishing shots of vast snowy fields and skies whose leadenness swallows the landscape. Even town streets and concert halls are steeped in austerity and drear. The effect is unexpectedly eye catching, as if John Singer Sargent had layered the countryside with shades of white upon white and gray upon gray.

We learn that Wiktor is a skilled pianist, composer, and conductor, but the music that makes his heart sing loudest is the physical and emotional allure of Zuzanna "Zula Lichoń (Joanna Kulig), an aspirant for Wiktor's folk spectacle. Their affair is complicated by their age differential, politics, circumstance, and passion of the most reckless kind—the sort that must play out, the costs be damned. Theirs is a steamy ardor that's equal part pleasure and pain that transcends safety, marital status, and ideology. Cold War spans 15 years and takes place in Poland, Berlin, Paris, and Yugoslavia. In keeping with the spare exteriors of the film, Pawlikowski uses screen wipes to shift from one time period or location to the next, and he uses vignettes within each that we recognize as metaphors for what has transpired in the intervening years. Does it matter that Wiktor walks away from communist Poland* to seek artistic freedom in the West, but Zula stays behind? Borders are obstacles, but they are not insurmountable ones.

Cold War is also a film about identity. National histories can be invented, but what of the traditions, culture, language, and collective memories embedded within the psyche? Does crossing a border make one French, or does it make one not French and not Polish– a vagabond in purgatory? Those who have studied the Cold War will recognize that the film's sense of personal ambiguity and incompleteness mirrors the geopolitical uncertainties of the era.

The overall stillness of Cold War is akin to black and white photos that come to life but cannot break the frames that contain them. In effect, Cold War is and isn't a love story. Think of it as a tone poem the likes of which Wiktor conducts but cannot resolve. Like a still photo or a musical movement connected episodically to an opera, Wiktor and Zula are part of bigger stories they intuit but cannot command. The namesake Cold War ultimately collapsed from its own weight and contradictions and so must Wiktor and Zula.

This is indeed a Polish Romeo and Juliet, but seldom has it been staged so gloriously. Joanna Kulig is a marvel. She is 36, but her natural plasticity and unique features allow her to be convincing as both a precocious and dangerous adolescent as well as a mature and voluptuous adult. Kot impresses in a less direct way. His very resignation is powerful in its passivity, an innervating negation if you will. Above them both stands Pawlikowski's masterful direction. I suspect that film students will be studying this film for many years to come.

Rob Weir

* World War II ended with the Allies liberating Europe from west to east and the Russians from east to west. The city of Berlin was divided into four zones. The American, British, and French sectors became West Berlin and the Russian zone East Berlin. In 1961, the Russians and East Germans built the Berlin Wall that prevented movement between East and West Berlin. Prior to this, it was dangerous but possible to flee communist East Berlin simply by walking through a checkpoint.

       

CCR, Black Masala, Ozan, Dream Reporter: New Releases

Credence Clearwater Revival, The Complete Studio Albums (Sampler)

Between 1968 and 1972, Credence Clearwater Revival (CCR) had an astonishing run: 7 albums and 9 songs that hit the Top Ten. Because of internal friction and bad business decisions, members of CCR didn’t do all that well financially, but my goodness what a treat for the ears they were. If you want to know what “swamp rock” sounds like, listen to CCR. Fifty years later, Craft Recordings has released all 7 of their albums in a boxed set. The hook is that these are studio recordings that have been transferred from analog at half speed. I received a sampler that includes tracks from 6 of the albums. (Nothing from Mardi Gras, which was a flop.) This doesn’t mean the music has been slowed, just that it hadn’t yet been mixed. It’s akin to taking a RAW picture before post-processing. The sampler includes songs such as “Born on the Bayou,” “Run through the Jungle,” and “Hey Tonight.” These were massive hits that retain great familiarity and provide windows into hearing things you might have overlooked in the singles. The studio recordings make J. C. Fogerty sound even mightier than you thought. His voice smashes through a song like a locomotive with a fell head of stream. Ditto his guitar licks. I especially enjoyed hearing “Porterville,” which is less known, because it revealed something I hadn’t remembered. Although he got much better, drummer Doug Clifford’s skills in 1968 were basically garage band level. We all start somewhere, yes? This anthropological dig makes CCR sound fresh and alive, not like museum pieces. It made me want to chase down a hoodoo bear, whatever the hell that might be! ★★★★★  (Note: These links are from different sources.)

Black Masala, Trains & Moonlight Destinies

And now for something completely different. Black Masala is brass band based in Washington, DC. Masala is an Indian spice mix; you name it, and you’ll find some of your favorite condiments in this band. The title track is a heart-racing blend of indie rock, jazz, klezmer, and lord knows what else. Black Masala is the kind of party band that will take you places, like New Orleans, Paris, Eastern Europe, and Delhi. I’m serious about the last of these; as you’ll hear on “MidnightBhangra,” this band also borrows from Southeast Asian dance music. In part that’s because lead singer Kristen Long can’t stand still. If you like a dash of saucy attitude, taste “Whatcha Gonna Do.” Need an infusion of funk, jazz, and soul? Try “Above the Clouds.” Everything comes at you in a bold, brassy stew of sax, trombone, trumpet, sousaphone, guitar, bass, and drums. What else do you want? “Big Man” offers an echo of salsa; “Chaje Shukarije” is Indian, Roma, and splashes of klezmer. Party on! Who knows where you'll end up? ★★★★

Ozan Aksoy, Ozan

If Black Masala isn’t exotic enough for you, how about some Turkish saz? Go to the front of the class if you know that this is a 7-stringed teardrop-shaped plucked instrument favored among Turkey’s Kurdish, Armenian, and Azerbaijani minorities, especially as it evolved from Ottoman classical styles. Ozan Aksoy is an immigrant Kurd who now lives in New York where he’s working on a Ph.D. in ethnomusicology. He also plays other instruments, but the saz captures both the beauty and sadness of Turkish minorities. (If you are unaware, Turkey has one of the world’s worst human rights records.) This is not to say that Ozan is a depressing album; Aksoy has chosen a more meditative and positive approach.  The opening track is titled “Hope” and within it you can hear various influences that are Turkish, but are also an intriguing blend of North American New Age mystery wrapped in a much more dramatic mix of other instruments. Guest musicians add everything from violin and cello to piano and electric guitar. “Rindé” is a fine example of this. It sounds almost like an Indian raga until you see it is clearly influenced by flamenco. In a very different way, Ozan is also masala. ★★★★

Dream Reporter, White Horse

If you need a pop/indie fix after all of this, London’s Dream Reporter might do the trick. That’s the handle of a young singer whose identity is currently a bit mysterious. She’s an unsigned artist who is obviously going for a build-the-buzz vibe and her bio line is sprayed with descriptions that press the right buttons but don't really describe her music. I did like the title track a lot. It has melody snatches some might recognize as reminiscent of “Son of a Preacher Man,” but it evolves into club pop with lots of synth, overlays, and (I think) drum machine. “Everything Means Something to Me” features echo chamber vocals that resonate, as do other tracks. Dream Reporter clearly has chops. In my mind, though, she needs a more diverse repertoire, lest she be tarred a Robyn-wannabe. And can the cloying buzz campaign. ★★★

Stan and Ollie a Light on its Feet Delight

Stan and Ollie (2018)

Directed by Jon S. Baird

Entertainment One, 93 minutes, PG.

★★★★★

Director Jon Baird takes liberties with the actual events upon which Stan and Ollie is based, but he got it right to present the relationship between them as a love story. It was not one in which a couple gazes at each other with puppy dog eyes as (metaphorical) fireworks explode against a background of string-heavy romantic music. Theirs was a non-sexual love that was deeper than friendship. It was every bit a can’t-imagine-life-without-you tale.

Stan and Ollie gets my vote for the biggest surprise of early 2019. I expected Steve Coogan (Stan Laurel) and John C. Reilly (Oliver Hardy) to be good and they surpassed my expectations. What I didn’t expect is how much I would care about their alter egos. Like most people my age, I used to watch recycled Laurel and Hardy films on TV when I was young. Those “old” movies–as I saw them then–were my initial contacts with cinematic history, but I thought no more about the individuals behind the roles than I did of the real-life Abbott and Costello or Three Stooges. In my view, Stan and Ollie is one of the better celebrity biographies in quite some time.

For you non-Baby Boomers, Laurel and Hardy were among the few comedy acts that survived the transition from silent films to sound. (Charley Chaplin and the Marx Brothers also made the shift.) The tall, rotund (6’1” 280 pounds) American-born Oliver Hardy (1890-1957) played straight man to the bumbling lean English-born Stan Laurel. Each had made scores of silent films before they teamed permanently in 1926. Over the next 25 years, though, they made an astonishing 107 films together, 23 of them full-length features. They became so well known that some of their stock phrases such as “Doh!” and “Well, here's another nice mess you’ve gotten me into” were pop culture buzz phrases, and Laurel’s unique head scratch was much imitated. Theirs was a vaudevillian mix of song, dance, and slapstick comedy.

Stan and Ollie opens in 1937, when Laurel and Hardy are (allegedly) the top-drawing act in Hollywood. (Actually it was Gary Cooper.) In the film, this is the pinnacle of their careers and they split when Hardy didn’t walk away from his contract with producer Hal Roach. It is true that Hardy was still under contract for six months after Laurel’s contract expired–a deliberate ploy by Roach to prevent team bargaining–but the two were estranged for months, not 16 years as the film implies, and Stan wasn’t angry when Ollie took roles in two (awful) films without him: The Fighting Kentuckian (1949) and Riding High (1950). Laurel actually encouraged him to go forth because they were angry with post-Roach studios that didn't give them script control.

In the film we leapfrog from 1937 to 1953, when the fading-from-public-acclaim duo reunited for a stage tour of the United Kingdom and Ireland. (Actually, they made a film, Atoll K, in 1951, but there was a hiatus occasioned by Hardy’s health problems.) At first they played to nearly empty houses, but the two soldiered on to rebuild their fame and friendship. Their final performance was a triumphant show in Plymouth, England, on May 17, 1954, by which time Hardy was battling congestive heart failure.  

Forget the script's deceptive turns. Coogan and Reilly are as sublime as the originals. They are nimble with quips and light on their feet, a particularly deft feat from Reilly, who wore a fat suit and prosthetics that added a hundred pounds to his fighting weight. The two interact in ways that are about as close as two heterosexual males can get without crossing the identity line. This extends to moments in which they are with their wives, Lucy (Shirley Henderson), Hardy’s second (and last) spouse; and Ida (Nina Arianda), Laurel’s third (of four). We witness a pair that is only really in their element when they are together, even if they are angry with one other. Coogan is terrific as a man at sea when faced with being on his own, and Reilly is so good as Hardy at the end of his string that it’s easy to overlook the subtlety embedded in his quiet performance. Both deserved Oscar nominations, but Hollywood doesn't like to honor films it doesn't make*. 

If one wishes to nitpick, begin with Shirley Henderson. I don't understand why she gets roles given that her dictation and voice are unintelligible. She’s also outdone by the feisty and snarky Arianda. Neither woman had a lot to do in this film but for once this isn’t sexism; the true love story is that of Stan and Ollie, who spent more time with each other than with any of the women or children in their lives. Another small critique is that a few of the exterior shots are rather obvious cheap sets.

Maybe Stan and Ollie isn't cutting-edge filmmaking, but director Jon Baird does a nice job of evoking the 1930s and early 1950s. For a short movie, Baird and screenwriter Jeff Pope also do credit to what film buffs will recognize as Sunset Boulevard syndrome. Must faded stars disappear into a black hole? Maybe not.

Rob Weir

*Entertainment One is a Canadian company and England's BBC Films coproduced it.

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