ENGLAND IS in serious trouble of running out of northern dystopias in which to set its award winning films. The Full Monty managed to combine the north and steelworks against a background of comic nudity, the pitch for Brassed Off probably included the words "north", "coalmine" "Ewan McGregor" and "brass instruments". With Billy Elliot, Lee Hall, the scriptwriter, has not so much as hit the jackpot in terms of sentimentality as cleaned out Las Vegas, much to the consternation of the elderly gambling classes.
So what do we get with our Billy? We get a kid growing up against the background of pit closures and strikes. Winters of discontent. Very nearly one of Thatcher's children, Billy gets to watch the police beat the living daylights out of picketters, but in true eleven year old style, if you asked him what he thought of it, he'd probably shrug "dunno". It's nice to see that today's kids have improved on his expressiveness. Hall gave us an apathetic, normal, typical kid who, one day, for no apparent reason (though I'm willing to suspend my disbelief just this once), has decided that he doesn't want to play boxing (more likely because he isn't any good at it) and would rather do a little bit of ballet.
Okay. It's a film. We'll pass on that.
Predictably, Billy's great at ballet, much better than the girls in the rest of the class. Quite why no one has cottoned on to the fact that Billy, at eleven, is probably going to be a bit more inclined to run about the place and not fall over than girls up to four years younger than he is, is beyond me, but there you go. He's good at ballet. That's all you need to know.
Ballet on its own in the grim North does not a good pitch make: we need some conflict in here. We have our wonderful bleak backdrop, we have our young hero. What we need now is a mother who committed suicide (cunningly thrown in at the beginning of the film, to ensure that you start crying now damnit), a father who's clearly fallen to bits after the loss of his wife, a grandmother who has alzheimer's and a teenager railing against the establishment and Margaret Thatcher.
Let us not forget, either, that ballet is for poofs. But that's not a problem here: Julie Walters, known more or less as "Miss" for the duration of the film, is quick to reassure Billy that Fred Astaire and his friends weren't gay, and aren't they wonderful.
Throw in some pre-teen sexuality ("Miss"'s daughter and Billy have a charged pillow fight which culminates, several scenes later in Debbie asking Billy "D'ya not fancy us, like?", to which he predictably replies "dunno". Debbie's only response to this is "I'll show you me fanny", at which point the entire audience proved that it isn't really possible to gasp and laugh at the same time, you just end up making a rather stupid, pathetic noise), and some transsexuality and you've got it made. In fact, Billy's even rather full of himself: when "Miss" offers to teach him, one-on-one for free, Billy quizically looks at her and asks "You don't fancy me, do you?"
I think the word you're looking for, if you're of a certain age, is scamp.
Is it any good, though? Well, yes. You're likely to walk out having seen Billy Elliot in one of two camps: either believing that yet again England has exploited the area north of Birmingham rather cruelly and the Arts Council may rest satisfied with the knowledge of yet another job well done, or believing that you've been duped by two hours of well-meaning, cunningly crafted sentimental tosh.
I tend towards the former. Without wishing to label Billy Elliot a masterpiece, it is a good film. Whilst there are sentimental scenes that you can spot fifteen miles away, there's an even greater number of poignant scenes that are genuinely touching. Do not forget, either, that Billy Elliot is also a black comedy: Billy's brother, Tony, is wonderfully written, making full use of a monosyllabic range that starts at "f**k off" and ends with, well, "f**k off", diverting somewhere in the middle to a brief diatribe against the state.
Billy Elliot's main failing, however, is the rather speedy conclusion: having spent three quarters of the film railing against his father and secretly (and in some cases comically) practising his pirouettes, Billy finally auditions for the Royal School of Ballet. I need not say any more than that things are wrapped up rather too quickly and neatly for my liking.
Without wishing to end on a cliche: You'll laugh, you'll cry and you'll enjoy it.
Billy Elliot Jamie Bell is an 11-year-old boy living in northeast England in the mid-1980s. While his gruff father and brother are taking part in a ma...More at Family Video
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