Predictable but often magical (spoilers)

Rating: 7/10 (11 October 2000)

Like almost every film about young people these days, Billy Elliot has a dead mum. What's going on, were childbirth methods medieval 20 years ago? Anyway, 'Billy' is getting the kind of acclaim here 'American Beauty' was getting over there last year; you know, more-than-a-film-take-it-to-your-heart kind of thing. Which made me wary. In its mixture of feel-good fantasy and gritty urban realism, it is very similar to 'Brassed off' as people have been saying, except where once the combination was bewilderingly complex, a mixture of anger, tears and exhiliration, the trick seems a little more formulaic this time, a little more pat. So when Billy gets into the ballet school, you expect the joy to be doused with the bitter petrol of socio-economic reality; when it is, the effect is not as moving as it should be.
Near the end there is a brilliant image of Dad and Tony being caged in an elevator shaft on returning to work after the unions are mauled by Thatcher's falange. This mirrors an earlier scene when Billy, frustrated by circumstances which contrive to deprive him of fulfilling his potential, dances an extraordinary Gene Kelly-like explosion of emotion, full of a thrilling violence, and finds himself continually hemmed in by walls. But Billy gets to go to London, gets to escape his family, history, economics, gender assumptions, his destiny, while his family remains firmly stuck in theirs. Likewise, the filmmakers are trapped in the prison of genre.
Once the narrative has been set up, there is barely a scene you cannot predict, such as Dad's initial hostility culminating in a spasm of generational violence, before eventually succumbing to the cause. The Royal Ballet is, of course, dreadfully upper claws, full of complacently nice toffs whose 'never mind, there's always next year' reassurances sear on a working class boy who is bloody lucky to get even one chance. Yes, he seems to fluff his audition, but in the film's phoniest moment, manages to articulate the feeling he gets when dancing, even though the whole point of the dancing was that it articulated what he could not say, wasn't allowed to say. When he gets the crucial letter from the Royal Ballet, there is the predictable 'suspenseful' dragging out of the result. His dead mother is replaced by a surrogate mother, but she makes the obligatory hallucinatory appearance. An excellent shot linking the cemetary to the fading industrial town is repeated to unsubtle effect.
Like Billy himself, the film's magic arises when its constraints force it to burst out - the credits sequence, to T-Rex's 'Cosmic Dancer', the banal wallpaper transformed, a suitably transcendent opening; the bending of time and space as Billy learns to twirl, his first step to promise, appropriately wreaking havoc on his own time and place; the feather foreplay with his teacher's daughter; the use of mirrors, not only to represent the continual splitting of Billy's personality (between genders; duty and desire; history and future; family and self), but as a magic gate into a fantasy, transformative world - one scene, where Billy and Mrs. Wilkinson are dancing in a boxing ring reflected in a mid-shot mirror, is brilliantly surreal; the sight of his friend in his sister's clothes; the harrowing scenes of the strike, proving once and for all the fascist basis of 80s Britain.

The final scene is misjudged (when Jamie Bell as Billy is replaced by another actor), although Dad's bewilderment in the metro is wonderful; and there is nothing quite as rapturous as the scene in the meadow or on the bus in 'Ratcatcher', but, in the absence of anything else, 'Billy' is fine.