The year's best love story: Jon S. Baird's elegiac and beautiful STAN & OLLIE

Don't worry: It's nothing sexual. Yet in STAN & OLLIE -- screenwriter Jeff Pope's and director Jon S. Baird's lovingly recreated tale of the final live-performance tour of that great motion picture comedy team of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy -- the filmmakers have managed to come up with the kind of full-fledged, comic, moving love story that we seldom see anymore.

Early on you may notice how very quiet the movie is. It never insists. Instead, it takes you into the world of Laurel & Hardy gently, and you soon begin to realize how actually gentle were so many of the team's most memorable moments. That, as much as anything, accounted for its popularity and fame.

Sure, the pair did slapstick and schtick, but at their core was a kind of sweetness, together with a perseverance, that stood them -- and their audience -- in very good stead.

And that is what director Baird (shown above) and screenwriter Pope (below),

along with their two gifted and versatile leading actors -- John C. Reilly (as Hardy) and Steve Coogan (as Laurel) allow us to discover in this wonderful new film.

Although (very wisely), the filmmakers let us see enough of the pair's comedy routines to understand why they were so popular in their day, the tone here is more elegiac than anything else.

Via the unusual quietude of the script and direction, Pope and Baird capture the beauty of a relationship that was so oddly close that at least one of these two could simply not perform without the other.

And while actors Coogan (above) and Reilly (below) have clearly done their homework as to the look, sound and "feel" of the men they are essaying, this is no mere "impersonation." The actors seem to inhabit not just the bodies of Laurel and Hardy but their very souls. Mr. Coogan, especially, has that soul down pat. This wondrously versatile actor (you must see his performance in The Dinner, if you haven't already, and in any or all of his "Trip" movies) show us here yet another side -- quiet and infinitely subtle -- we've not yet seen, and he is remarkable.

Mr. Reilly, on the other hand, is reliably funny and often just this side of over-the-top, as was Oliver Hardy. The two actors are as good at bringing to fine life these icons of our movie past as they are in bringing to to even better life the inner lives of the two men. You'll come away from Stan & Ollie with as much of a sense of the characters of these men -- their thoughts, hopes, annoyances -- as of their performing lives.

As the two most important women on the scene, both Shirley Henderson (above, left, as Ollie's wife, Lucille) and Nina Arianda (above, right, as Stan's wife, Ida) are entertaining, compelling -- and funny, too.

The film's story takes in the final British tour the comedy duo did in order to impress the man whom Laurel hoped would bankroll their comeback film. The imaginary scenes we see from this would-be film prove both memorably comic (we get to see and hear one of Hardy's most famous retorts) and infinitely sad.

As Stan & Ollie moves quietly along, it builds surprising emotional force via the accumulation of tiny details and small incidents.

Baird's and Pope's refusal to go for the big scenes and most obvious choices results in a little gem of a film -- one of the year's best -- in which repressed feelings somehow land with more meaning and resonance than does the usual Hollywood grandstanding.

From Sony Pictures Classics and running a just-right 97 minutes, after hitting New York and L.A. a few weeks back, Stan & Ollie opens here in South Florida this Friday, January 18, at the AMC Aventura 24, Aventura; Living Room Theaters, Boca Raton; Cinemark Palace 20, Boca Raton; Regal Shadowood 16, Boca Raton; Cinemark 14, Boynton Beach; Cinepolis Coconut Grove, Landmark Merrick Park, Coral Gables; Cinemark Paradise 24, Davie; The Movies of Delray and The Movies of Lake Worth; The Classic Gateway, Fort Lauderdale; Cinepolis 14, Jupiter; CMX Brickell City Center, Miami; Regal South Beach 18, Miami Beach; Cobbs Downtown at the Gardens 16, Palm Beach Gardens. Wherever you live across the USA, simply click here -- and then click on GET TICKETS on the task bar atop the screen to find a theater near you.