I saw “Billy Elliot” in a theater last fall and again last week, with its language bowderlized on an American Airlines flight (no doubt this is the version available at Blockbuster). The first time, I was swept away by memories of my own adolescent aspiration to escape a cultural wasteland of a small town. The second time, I was more interested in the adults trying to help the youth break out.

Jamie Bell is totally convincing in the title role, a not-at-all articulate boy (supposedly eleven) who is fascinated by the ballet class that meets in the gym where he is a signal failure as a boxer. His father and grandfather were champion boxers, but Billy cannot concentrate and gets knocked down when his attention wanders. The chain-smoking Mrs. Wilkinson (Julie Walters) hides her surprise at Billy’s interest, but soon realizes he has major talent, and knows what needs to be done to get him a shot at a career.

Billy is a very edgy protégé, but Mrs. Wilkinson manages him well. She has an even greater challenge with Billy’s family, but she bravely takes that and the requisite abuse in stride. Billy’s brother Tony (Jamie Draven) is particularly appalled. (Why isn’t he boxing, I want to know...)

The boy’s mother, whose piano no one knows how to play, is dead. The father, Jackie Elliot, played by Gary Lewis, is a coal miner, and Tony has followed in this line of work that was going nowhere in the youth of D. H. Lawrence (“Sons and Lovers”) and is nearing its end in 1984 in a bitter strike. The father is much more aware than his fervent union-supporting son (1) that violence will be brutally repressed by the Thatcher regime, and (2) that there is no future in being a coal miner. Tony does not know either of these things, and Billy has yet to give them any thought. He does not evidence any inkling that to have a life he has to get out of the decaying town and dying industry.

Once the father is convinced that Billy has a real chance to succeed as a dancer, he makes great sacrifices, not least overcoming his unease in entering a bastion of the upper class, the Royal Ballet School. His conversion experience is sudden, but, I think, credible. And moving. Tony follows, more sentimentally. What I find somewhat strange is that none of Billy’s classmates pokes fun at the queer path he is taking.

Debbie (Nicola Blackwell), his teacher’s daughter, and his proto-queen only friend Michael (Stuart Wells), both fail to seduce him. (And one of the funniest parts of the movie is when Mrs. Wilkinson assures Billy that she does not fancy him as a sexual partner).

The working class dancer auditioning echoes many other movies, notably “Fame” and “Flashdance” (though Jamie Bell, unlike Jennifer Beals, dances his bid) and there are many English films about the hard and doomed life of coal miners (I’ve already mentioned “Sons and Lovers”; I guess that John Ford’s “How Green Was My Valley” is an American movie...). And the class differences (a gazillion English movies; “Chariots of Fire” for one)... Can we call this “intertextuality” rather than labeling “Billy Elliot” derivative”?

There are some very strange dance numbers, including one in which riot police shields are a major prop. Billy is taking ballet classes, but one might wonder where he learned tap-dance and modern dance, but I think that it is better to suspend disbelief about breaking into dance and enjoy the dance as dance. I realize that the movie isn’t really a musical. It is a movie about a talented kid in a harsh setting who breaks into dance from time to time. (Is “Pennies from Heaven” a musical? Dancer in the Dark”? “Fame”? “Flashdance”? Some award-winning “musicals” such as “Gigi” and “The Sound of Music” have considerably less dancing than “Billy Elliot”...)

I think the dancing--and the undisciplined flight of the opening and closing T-Rex’s “Cosmic Dancer”--is enjoyable. I think that all the actors deliver excellent, somewhat quirky performers. Some have found the “Swan Lake” ending unnecessary. It may not be necessary, but it ties up at least one loose end. (It seems to me that Debbie should be there, too; we can presume that her mother has died of lung cancer. But Billy is dancing music she loved.)

The inchoate but talented kid overcoming impossible odds works, but, as I began by saying, what I find particularly moving from my second viewing is the older generation filled with disappointment in their own lives and trying to help the talented youngster succeed. Their regrets and their hopes are communicated almost entirely nonverbally by Lewis and Walters. (As a senile grandmother, Jean Heywood is also quirkily good.) The children (Bell, Blackwell, Wells,) are superb, but they do not have to carry the movie.



Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: VHS
Video Occasion: Good for Groups
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 9 - 12