Boy overcomes coal-mining Dad's objections to become a dancer

Rating: Null/10 (12 August 2001)

Okay, let's just take it as a given that the premise of this movie is more than a little familiar: A young boy must overcome his coal mining father's misgivings about ballet to get into the British Royal Academy of Ballet or whatever it's called. (Have you ever seen the Monty Python sketch about the son who comes home and announces to his actor father that he wants to be a coal miner? This plot was a cliche thirty years ago!) I guess I can forgive a movie for starting with a weak premise.
But hasn't anyone noticed how paper thin and poorly developed the story is once we proceed from that shopworn premise? I mean, where's the actual struggle to learn how to dance? Isn't THAT the most difficult part of becoming a professional ballet dancer? We get about one, one-minute scene in which Billy Elliot tries to do a pirouette, falls down and says `I can't do it!' to which his tough-but-lovable instructor says, "Yes you can! Again!" And that's really the extent of his struggle to LEARN how to dance.
Now I know what you're thinking: `Ah, but the real struggle is against the tyranny of the stereotype that all male dancers are gay!' But that doesn't seem to be much of a problem for Billy either. I mean, his father and brother have to be weaned from this stereotype, but everyone else in town is giving him the thumbs up and cheering him on from the moment Billy decides he wants to be a dancer.
This movie is beautifully shot, scored, and acted, but none of this can make up for such a weak script. I guess that for people who've never seen one of these artist-struggles-mightily-against-his circumstances-to-become-a-star movies it seems like some kind of revelation, but to me it just seemed like a very poorly developed, connect-the-dots story.
It had a few effective moments, (I liked particularly the scene in which the older brother sees his father on the scab express and goes running after him) But, from what I can recall, all of the other effective scenes in this movie concern the miner's strike subplot, and not the main Billy Elliot line. The main plot of this movie is barely present.