Wilkinson mentions that Billy might just qualify for acceptance in London’s prestigious Royal Ballet School. What results is a prime example of major studio emotional heavy-handedness seeping into even small independent films. Not trusting the audience to have any reaction that has not been completely stage-managed, they lay on the sentimentality and the cliches as thick as they can, which is pretty thick. There’s of course a lot of potential in a story like this and no compelling need to push it as hard as possible, but the concept of leaving well enough alone is clearly alien to screenwriter Lee Hall and debut director Stephen Daldry. “It’s not for lads,” his perplexed dad says of the boy’s passion, and Billy finds himself continually educating the louts in town who think male ballet dancers are invariably gay. The biggest hurdle for Billy to overcome, it turns out, is the familiar one of sexual stereotyping and family disapproval. His older brother Tony (Jamie Draven) would as soon smack him as look at him his widower father (“My Name Is Joe’s” Gary Lewis) goes off as regularly as Old Faithful and neither man has had his disposition improved by participation in a strike that grows increasingly bitter and partisan as the film progresses. Wilkinson has the ability to encourage and motivate him.Ĭertainly there is little in Billy’s background that would make this talent predictable. It’s a shock to both of them to realize that Billy has a true gift for dance and that Mrs. Wilkinson herself, a tart-tongued woman of middle years (the perennially overripe Julie Walters) much given to dramatic gestures with a cigarette and a tough love approach to teaching. The boy is rather more ambivalent about Mrs. Almost viscerally, Billy is drawn toward this gaggle of baby ballerinas in white tutus and the strange but graceful movements they are learning. Wilkinson’s ballet class, displaced by the soup kitchen used to feed the striking miners, arrives to share the gym space. Billy is busy taking boxing lessons when Mrs. “Billy Elliot” begins with a kind of reverse twist on “Girlfight,” about a girl attracted to the world of boxing. Unlike its contrived dramatic aspects, this film’s sense of the joy inherent in pure physical movement never lets it down. The best scenes in “Billy Elliot” are invariably the dialogue-less ones in which the boy, briskly choreographed by Peter Darling, tears down the streets of his hometown, often with the vintage music of T. A natural talent with an open smile and an eagerness for experience stamped on his face, Bell portrays Billy as a real boy’s boy, a good lad whose defining trait is a constitutional inability to simply stand still.Įven before he takes a liking to ballet, Billy feels the music in his life, running and jumping when everyone else is marking time.
The best aspects of “Billy” all involve Jamie Bell, the young actor who plays him. But in its determination to overdo sure-fire material, “Billy Elliot” becomes as impossible to wholeheartedly embrace as it is to completely reject. But focusing too much on being well-liked, the Lomans find to their eventual despair, can be a trap, and it’s a trap that “Billy Elliot” falls into.įor there are things to genuinely like about this crowd-pleasing story of 11-year-old Billy, growing up in the coal-mining North of England during the 1984 miners’ strike, who resolves against obvious odds to be a ballet dancer. The One Young World, which gathers 1,300 young leaders from all 196 countries to tackle the globe’s most pressing issues, contributed to accommodation of the writer’s trip to Colombia.It’s not enough, Willy Loman famously tells his sons in Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman,” to be merely liked. The consequences of not doing that, as well the destruction of the labor movement juxtaposed with the “weird kid that wants to get out,” makes the message behind Billy Elliot just as relevant now.
But what I do know is a good idea is keeping those communities strong, safe, and giving them a valid means of employment,” Daldry says. Or a reliance on fossil fuels is a good idea. “I’m not suggesting that people want to be miners. “It doesn’t matter where you are in the world, people understand the idea that you’re part of an industrial, working class group that is being discarded.” And its question-of what happens to communities devastated by de-industrialization and privatization-has been thrust into the spotlight with the Brexit vote and the election of Donald Trump.
For Daldry, the “loss of community” is key to the film’s global appeal.