Billy Elliot

Some people just got to dance, and eleven-year-old Billy Elliot is one of them. From the moment young Billy spies the dance class sharing the gym with his boxing class, he is hooked. He can barely explain it, but it is dancing that allows him to express what is in his heart. So he abandons the boxing at which he is no good anyway, and begins spending the fifty pence his father gives him for boxing classes on ballet instead. Thus begins “Billy Elliot,” an endearing and entertaining British import set in Northern England in 1984, and starring expressive Jamie Bell as the title character. Not surprisingly, Northern England, especially in the middle of a bitter coalminer strike, is not particularly conducive to the development of male ballet dancers. For one thing, everyone in Billy’s town believes that all male dancers are gay (“poofs” in the British vernacular) by definition. Billy’s volatile Dad (played by Gary Lewis) is especially appalled. “Lads like football,” he sputters. “Boxing. Wrestling. Not ballet.” But Billy perseveres, taking classes in secret from Mrs. Wilkinson (Walters), who recognizes real talent in Billy and tries to push him to achieve his potential. Writer Lee Hall’s script is crowd pleasing if not especially original.

The picture dawdles in setting up the basic conflict, and could have benefited from tighter editing overall. It also leans a little heavily on the melodrama (such as when Billy’s family conflicts force him to miss a critical audition). Billy’s relationship with a schoolmate just coming to terms with his sexuality is rather predictable, and the script indulges in some scenes that lack focus and significance. But Stephen Daldry’s direction is, for the most part, effective. He captures the steely gray skies of Northern England and the despair felt by the miners as they slowly lose their battle with the management. He elicits strong performances from the cast. Bell and Walters stand out, but even Lewis and Draven leave an impression, despite their relatively underwritten parts. Without doubt, the highlights of the film are Billy’s dance sequences, and the secret weapon here is Bell, who plays Billy with an appealing openness which explodes into joy when he dances. Bell really can dance, and he manages to show us what Billy is feeling when he dances, as surely as if he were saying it out loud. The filmmakers also do a nice job with the counterpoint between Billy’s ebullient dancing and the ominous choreography of the encroaching police forces trying to keep the peace during the strike.

If the contrast between fresh faced Billy with his hopes and the grim faced strikers with their despair is a bit studied, it is also undeniably effective. We root for Billy to escape the fate that has befallen his town, and in the end, so does his family. “Billy Elliot” draws on a long tradition of idiosyncratic British films replete with eccentric peripheral characters. It freely mixes comedy with economic despair, not unlike the recent British smash “The Full Monty.” But Billy’s penultimate audition owes a lot more to that campy classic “Flashdance,” in which blue collar welder Jennifer Beals wows the grim-faced audition judges with her unconventional dance moves. Billy does exactly the same thing in the new picture; in fact, the movies are cut from the same emotional cloth. While “Billy Elliot” hits most of the conventional buttons, it struggles to avoid some of the more obvious, and to some extent that plan backfires. There is no way to downplay the shameless emotionality of a movie like this one, so the sensible thing is to go for broke; any attempts at restraint can actually leave the audience feeling somewhat deprived, and that actually happens here on occasion (see Billy’s response when he gets his letter from the ballet school). Still, “Billy Elliot” packs in enough emotional highlights to touch all but the most hardened and cynical viewers, and to them I say, if you don’t want to feel good, then don’t go to a feel good movie. If you do, then “Billy Elliot” will fit the bill just fine. (10/17/2000)