It is precisely the time and place, however, for him to succeed. For someone to succeed. If, to regular moviegoers, this plot line sounds vaguely familiar, it should. In the underrated Brassed Off (1998), striking English miners took solace in their town's amateur brass band; in the far more popular The Full Monty, out-of-work Brits lifted their spirits by reinventing themselves as a troupe of male strippers. Billy Elliot falls squarely into the same triumph-over-trouble genre, but that's not to say it should be written off as an imitation. For one thing, the film's young star, an exuberant whirling dervish named Jamie Bell, is such a winning, witty screen presence that you can't help pulling for his plucky Billy. For another, the steely father (Gary Lewis) and the sulky brother (Jamie Draven) who oppose him sport vivid personalities of their own. For a third, Billy Elliot can be as howlingly funny as it is touching. If British filmmaking wants to stage a comeback, it is likely to happen by way of nuanced, character-rich movies like this.
Daldry, a stage director making his movie debut, and screenwriter Lee Hall don't hesitate to load the deck emotionally, but that comes with the territory. Billy's mother has died young, which comes as no great surprise; neither does the gruff, chain-smoking ballet teacher, Mrs. Wilkinson (Julie Walters), who takes a special interest in him. To spice things up even more, the moviemakers provide the boy with a doddering grandmother (Jean Heywood) who still imagines that she could have been a great dancer, and a best friend (Stuart Wells) who turns out to be gay. Meanwhile, the movie takes pains to point out that Billy himself is resolutely hetero. When we first see this scrawny, disjointed kid in physical action, he's getting his clock cleaned at the local boys' boxing club, and when he finds himself drawn to the girls' ballet class being conducted in the same gymnasium, he worries about it. "I feel like a sissy," he admits, his hormones obviously in pre-adolescent torment.
That's nothing compared to Dad's outrage when he discovers Billy spinning pirouettes. "Lads do football or boxing or wrestling," he rants, "not...ballet." The father spits the word out like an obscenity, and we know right away that the birth of this artist is going to involve some labor pains. Widowed, on strike and frustrated, Dad has enough trouble putting food on the table. He doesn't need a son he thinks is a poof -- better he turns out to be Rocky Balboa.
Inevitably, familial love goes to battle with ignorance. When Mrs. Wilkinson, who has an eye for raw talent if not much talent herself, urges Billy to follow his calling and audition for the Royal Ballet School in far-off London, the film's real crisis erupts. Will the young hero, uncertain about his own abilities, and almost everything else, have the guts to be true to himself? Will the father be able to set aside prejudice and honor his son's dream? You don't need a film critic to answer such questions. Suffice it to say that director Daldry has a splendid way with actors, and a keen eye for the comic potential and the deeper meaning of a scene. Witness the Elliot family's heart-wrenching Christmas celebration, with the impoverished family sitting in its tiny kitchen wearing paper hats, the mortified father barely containing his shame. Watch Dad open the family jewelry box, for reasons he couldn't have imagined. Exult in Billy and Dad's weird trip to alien London.
If there's more than a hint of hokeyness in all this, so be it. Movies can (and most often do) commit worse sins than strumming away on our heartstrings. But the strumming can become not just palatable but downright enjoyable if it is decorated, as it is here, with some sharp observations on class warfare, the confusions of boyhood and the stubbornness of provincial thought. Besides, who shouldn't be reminded once in a while that there's more than one way for Rocky to win a big fight?
Balletomanes won't confuse Billy Elliot with transcendent dance films like The Red Shoes or I Am a Dancer anytime soon, because the blue-eyed, jug-eared, sometimes splay-footed kid we meet here has trouble getting out of his own way throughout most of the film. But it would be a mistake to undervalue Billy's enthusiasm, his need for escape, the purity of his desire. As we all should know by now, from such small steps great leaps do spring.
