Triumphant

Rating: Null/10 (17 January 2001)

I don't understand the verdict of some critics and commenters that this film is flawed because of something far-fetched, derivative, or on the other hand predictable, in its basic premise. This assumption can only come from ignorance or prejudice.
The fact is that as long as ballet has existed, so, necessarily, have male ballet dancers, and in considerable numbers, although of course they are not ballerinas (a term reserved for the female). This is an honorable and demanding fine art whose adepts must be, among other attainments, athletes of a high order.
Female boxers also exist, but we can be thankful that they are an aberration. Real-life Lynn Snowden Picket was, for awhile, just as serious about boxing as Billy Elliot was about dancing. She trained for months at that crucible of the gloved greats, Gleason's gym in Brooklyn, where she insisted on a real coach, not the staff member that such places maintain especially to mollycoddle the dilettanti who like to hang around. After proving herself by winning a professional match, she concluded that boxing is bad stuff both physically and psychologically, gave it up, and wrote a book about her experiences, _Looking_for_a_fight_, to dissuade not only women but everyone in general from this pursuit.
Now, anyone IMHO who notes a symmetry between two films in which, respectively, a girl aspires (if one can call it that) to a detrimental practice that most have the good sense to leave to misguided males, and a boy aspires to a noble art only reputedly dominated by females, only to maintain that the latter must be little but plagiarism simply on account of the calendar, didn't look or think very carefully and has a lot of explaining yet to do.
The historic coequal presence of women and men on the ballet stage being obvious from the most cursory observation, one must go on to ask where the men came from. Surely some arose from poor and lower-class backgrounds. Although one need only click on this Web page to appreciate that the impoverished and culturally deprived have no monopoly on misunderstanding ballet, at least they have some excuse for it. All the likelier it is, then, that some, at least, of our actual male ballet stars had as boys to deal just as heroically with an environment like Billy Elliot's. (Hence, I was glad to see that Billy's sexuality remained ambiguous. He can be hetero, homo, or bisexual as each viewer wishes. As he observed, one does not have to be gay to dance well. Neither must one be straight to be admired for it.)
I submit, therefore, that Billy's story is, in principle, both true-to-life and worth the telling, leaving it to others to dispute, if they can, the verisimilitude of details. It is worth noting, however, that few of those all-too-happy to consign it to the dustbin over some a-priori objection have actually dared to engage themselves with what is on the screen in front of them.