Billy Elliot
UK 2000
Reviewed by Claire Monk
Synopsis
Our synopses give away the plot in full, including surprise twists.
County Durham, 1984. Eleven-year-old Billy endures the hardship of the year-long miners' strike, living with his striking father, brother Tony and grandma. During a boxing lesson, Billy becomes fascinated with a ballet class being conducted in the same hall. Dared to join the session by the teacher, Mrs Wilkinson, he shows talent and secretly drops boxing for her class. When his father finds out, he bans Billy from further lessons. Convinced of Billy's potential, Mrs Wilkinson trains him for free, preparing him for a regional audition for the Royal Ballet School. Tony is beaten up by the police and arrested, causing Billy to miss the audition. Mrs Wilkinson urges Billy's dad to support him, but a row ensues.
At Christmas, Billy breaks into the village hall with his friend Michael and dances. His father sees him and recognises his son's talents. Now determined Billy should audition for the ballet school, his dad plans to return to work to pay for the trip to the audition, but is dissuaded from doing so by his fellow strikers, who help him raise the fare. Following an audition, Billy is offered a place at the school. Later, Dad and Tony travel to London to see Billy in Swan Lake.
Review
Hailed as the next likely feelgood British hit, Billy Elliot, like Brassed Off and The Full Monty before it, revisits the formerly industrial north of England - here, a colliery town during the miners' strike of the mid 80s. The feature debut of theatre director Stephen Daldry, it also replicates the earlier two films' curious, but very Blairite, narratives where post-industrial despair and masculine crisis are resolved through an engagement with the entertainment or cultural industries. (Here, Billy's dreams of becoming a ballet dancer create tensions between the 11-year-old and his striking dad.) But Billy Elliot reconfigures these ingredients rather than simply reheating them. While it lacks the dreamlike ambiguity of Lynne Ramsay's Ratcatcher, its quirky focus on the transitional zone between childhood and adulthood recalls that film as much as its more commercial precursors.
Daldry and screenwriter Lee Hall's film also feels a lot truer to authentic experience than The Full Monty or Brassed Off, perhaps because it's less fraudulently upbeat. Major credit must go to Jamie Bell as Billy: gangly and sandy-haired, he's a knockout dancer who also perfectly conveys an adult-child mix of mouthy defiance and sensitive introspection. Billy's circumstances are signalled with quiet economy. When his dad smashes his late mother's piano with an axe, we assume this is yet another act of aggression. But then we see the piano hammers burning as firewood. The gulf of class and culture which Billy will have to cross if he is accepted at the Royal Ballet School is never discussed; yet we only have to see Billy and his father cowed by the school's neo-classical interior to feel (wrongly) that Billy will never join this world.
Where Brassed Off and The Full Monty's trips to declining industrial heartlands proved to be excuses for emotive male bonding, Billy Elliot's boy-doing-ballet premise leads to a more equivocal relationship to dominant masculinity. At times, the film seems embarrassed by the burden of sexual/gender politics attached to its theme. The script, and Billy's robust dancing (which owes more to Michael Flatley than Frederick Ashton) work overtime to assure us that it's "not just poofs" who do ballet. Unfortunately for Billy, the example he cites to his dad here is Wayne Sleep, a dancer as camp as they come. But the film's notion of acceptable male identities is more polymorphous than this joke suggests. When unveiled as a cross-dresser, Billy's best friend Michael claims to have picked up the habit from his dad. Later, it becomes clear Michael is attracted to Billy. Billy doesn't reciprocate, but this doesn't provoke a crisis in their friendship, either. Billy's own sexuality remains undefined: he may not fancy Michael, but he is equally uninterested in his teacher Mrs Wilkinson's daughter Debbie.
Billy Elliot's story could plausibly belong to the present, raising the question of why it's set in 1984. Given the emotions surrounding the miners' strike, the film is politically circumspect to an extent which seems evasive. In narrative terms, the striking miners (represented by Billy's aggressive father and brother Tony) function as little more than a sign of the masculine class culture which initially thwarts Billy's ambitions. But Billy Elliot is equally mistrustful of those who opposed the strike, and its avoidance of politics only serves to underline the difficulty of neatly tying up the conflicts underlying the dispute. The 15-year ellipsis before the film's rapturous ending leaves much unanswered. We see Billy leave for ballet school but never learn how happily he fitted in, or at what cost. We only know that he can dance.
Credits
- Director
- Stephen Daldry
- Producers
- Greg Brenman
- Jon Finn
- Screenplay
- Lee Hall
- Director of Photography
- Brian Tufano
- Editor
- John Wilson
- Production Designer
- Maria Djurkovic
- Music/Orchestrations
- Stephen Warbeck
- ©Tiger Aspect Pictures Ltd.
- Production Companies
- Working Title Films/ BBC Films in association with the Arts Council of England present a Tiger Aspect Pictures production in association with WT2
- Developed by BBC Films
- Supported by the National Lottery through The Arts Council of England
- Executive Producers
- Natascha Wharton
- Charles Brand
- Tessa Ross
- David M. Thompson
- Line Producer
- Tori Parry
- Executive in Charge of Production
- Angela Morrison
- Production Executive
- Grainne Marmion
- Production Co-ordinator
- Francesca Dowd
- WT2 Company Co-ordinator
- Amanda Boyle
- Durham Unit Manager
- Nick Waldron
- Location Managers
- Christine Llewellyn-Reeve
- Joseph Jayawardena
- Post-production
- Co-ordinator:
- Emma Zee
- Consultancy:
- Steeple Post Production Services Ltd
- Assistant Directors
- Martin Harrison
- Finn McGrath
- Mike Hanley
- 2nd Unit:
- Alison Banks
- Alexander Bignell
- Aurelia Thomas
- Script Supervisor
- Zoë Morgan
- Casting
- Jina Jay
- Associates:
- Shaheen Baig
- Pippa Hall
- Chloe Emmerson
- Script Editor
- Roanna Benn
- Additional Photography
- Robert Shipsey
- 2nd Unit Director of Photography
- Robert Fabbri
- Visual Effects
- Double Negative
- Special Effects
- Supervisor:
- Stuart Murdoch
- Technician:
- Daniel Wright
- Art Director
- Adam O'Neill
- Set Decorator
- Tatiana Lund
- Storyboard Artist
- Stephen Forrest Smith
- Costume Designer
- Stewart Meacham
- Costume Supervisor
- Alison Goss
- Hair/Make-up
- Designer:
- Ivana Primorac
- Artist:
- Nikita Rae
- Opticals/Titles
- Cine Image
- Musicians
- Piano:
- Dave Hartley
- Cello Solo:
- Anthony Pleeth
- Guitars:
- John Parricelli
- Bass:
- Andy Pask
- Drums:
- Ian Thomas
- Conductor
- Nick Ingman
- Orchestra Leader
- Rolf Wilson
- Music Supervisor
- Nick Angel
- Music Recordist/Mixer
- Chris Dibble
- Soundtrack
- "Top Hat White Tie and Tails" - Fred Astaire; "A Child Is Born" - Douglas Corbin; "Cosmic Dancer", "I Love to Boogie", "Children of the Revolution", "Get It On", "Ride a White Swan" -
T-Rex; "London Calling" - The Clash; "I Believe" -Stephen Gately;
"Town Called Malice" - - The Jam; "Burning Up"
- Eagle-Eye Cherry - Choreographers
- Peter Darling
- Associate:
- Lynne Page
- Production Sound Mixer
- Mark Holding
- Re-recording Mixer
- Mike Prestwood Smith
- Supervising Sound Editor
- Zane Hayward
- Dialogue Editor
- Stewart Henderson
- ADR
- Recordists:
- Darren McQuade
- Ted Swanscott
- Editor:
- Stewart Henderson
- Foley
- Artists:
- Hugh Johnson
- Ted Swanscott
- Editor:
- Anthony Faust
- Stunt Co-ordinator
- Lee Sheward
- Horses
- Timber Tops
- Film Extract
- Top Hat (1935)
- Cast
- Julie Walters
- Mrs Wilkinson
- Gary Lewis
- dad
- Jamie Draven
- Tony
- Jean Heywood
- grandmother
- Jamie Bell
- Billy
- Adam Cooper
- Billy aged 25
- Stuart Wells
- Michael
- Mike Elliot
- George Watson
- Billy Fane
- Mr Braithwaite
- Nicola Blackwell
- Debbie
- Carol McGuigan
- librarian
- Joe Renton
- Gary Poulson
- Colin MacLachlan
- Mr Wilkinson
- Janine Birkett
- Billy's mum
- Trevor Fox
- PC Jeff Peverly
- Charlie Hardwick
- Sheila Briggs
- Denny Ferguson
- miner
- Dennis Lingard
- NCB official
- Matthew Thomas
- Simon
- Stephen Mangan
- ballet doctor
- Paul Ridley
- tutor in medical
- Patrick Malahide
- principal
- Barbara Leigh-Hunt
- vice-principal
- Imogen Claire
- Diana Kent
- Neil North
- Lee Williams
- tutors
- Petra Siniawski
- teacher
- Merelina Kendall
- secretary
- Zoe Bell
- Sandra
- Tracey Wilkinson
- geography teacher
- Merryn Owen
- Michael aged 25
- Certificate
- 15
- Distributor
- United International Pictures (UK) Ltd
- 9,914 feet
- 110 minutes 9 seconds
- Dolby Digital
- In Colour
- various festival screenings as
- Dancer