A friend recently declared that he refuses to watch Billy Elliot, because he's sick of all those "
plucky northener" movies which we've been getting ever since the surprise success of
The Full Monty. Which set me to thinking, because I cried buckets at Billy Elliot while barely raising a chuckle for TFM.
Unlike oh so many movies that purport to tell a story of a community, or era, or event, through the coming of age struggle of one member, and end up about being about that one story (Brassed Off being a prime example in this particular genre), Billy Elliot is a film that tries to tell the story of one small boy and ends up being about everything: the miner's strike, the union battles, poverty, bereavement, authority, The North, the generation gap, the stifling homogeneity of a small community, fatherhood, boyhood, pre-teen sexuality, the role of a teacher in a child's life and a father's expectations of his son. The ballet bit is kinda secondary.
In the best sense of the word, and again in contrast to much other cinema recently louded, Billy's passion for dancing is symbolic of the struggle for survival, plain and simple, going on all around him. This is beautifully expressed in the fact that Billy's dancing is never allowed to improve during the film. Not for him the heroic butterfly-like transformation. Awkward, jerking and violently passionate, it is much more an expression of the turbulence underlying the lives of the characters than an aesthetic achievment.
Enough has been said above and elsewhere of the masterful acting, the well written dialogue, the quirky soundtrack and the excellent direction of the film for me to dwell on it here. All I can add is that if you haven't experienced the misery of the Northern English people during the early eighties Thatcher era, this is by all accounts as close as you can get to it.