Every other British movie released in the U.S. is pushed as "this year's `The Full Monty,'" even though the label has yet to fit; just because "Waking Ned Devine" and "Saving Grace" were engineered as whimsical crowd-pleasers doesn't mean they capture what made their supposed role model special.
If any movie has earned such a comparison, it's Stephen Daldry's "Billy Elliot." Like "The Full Monty," the plot description sounds cutesy: An 11-year-old boy begins skipping his boxing lessons to take instruction in ballet. And like "The Full Monty," the new movie finds its humor not in cheap gags but in the way sympathetic, complex people react to harsh circumstances in a working-class English town.
Billy (Jamie Bell) isn't some effete child consciously turning to artistic expression to transcend his surroundings, in this case northern England at the peak of the 1984 battle between striking coal miners and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. He's no more self-aware than most 11-year-olds; what he does know is that when he lowers the turntable needle onto one of his older brother's T. Rex albums, he can't help jumping around on his bed wearing a goofy grin.
Billy's mother is dead, and his father (Gary Lewis) and brother, Tony (Jamie Draven), are among the striking miners, with Tony taking a particularly militant role. The boxing lessons presumably will toughen up Billy for the fights to come, but he's not terribly skilled or inspired.
Meanwhile, his curiosity is piqued when the gym begins sharing space with girls ballet lessons led by a cigarette-smoking, middle-aged woman, Mrs. Wilkinson (Julie Walters). Billy dawdles after class, intrigued by the way these girls are moving (or trying to move), until the no-nonsense Mrs. Wilkinson all but orders him to join in. He eventually trades his high-topped boxing shoes for ballet slippers, though he doesn't tell his dad or brother for fear of their uncomprehending reaction. In other hands this situation could have become a predictable, cliched tale about how a sensitive boy helps rugged, beer-swigging Englishmen learn to appreciate the finer points of dance. But Daldry, a renowned English stage director making his filmmaking debut, brings a keen sense of nuance and sharp cinematic eye to Lee Hall's well-observed script, which tends to eschew revelatory speeches for characters finding their way intuitively.
The movie brims with visual wit that helps tell the story. In one scene, Mrs. Wilkinson's daughter Debbie (Nicola Blackwell) walks down the street with Billy, tapping a stick against a wall. The wall gives way to a line of shields held by police in riot gear. Debbie keeps walking and tapping, never glancing sideways as the shields end and the wall returns; for these kids violent confrontations between their townspeople and the police are just part of the scenery.Adding energy is a soundtrack that mixes rousing anthems of the period by the Jam and the Clash with several early '70s T. Rex songs, which match sexually ambiguous singer Marc Bolan's insinuating delivery with muscular, fuzzy guitars and bubble-gum catchiness. That mixture of toughness and sweetness is reflected throughout.
Billy never actually struggles with sexual-identity issues, though his delicate friend Michael (Stuart Wells) does in a subplot that's nicely handled. Billy still reacts to frustration with his fists, and although he releases tension through his feet, he's not one of those prodigies who naturally can pirouette like Baryshnikov. Mrs. Wilkinson is driven to push him less because of his readymade skills than his passion and artistic temperament, which he barely can grasp. Newcomer Bell does a terrific job of making Billy's unharnessed impulses natural. His dances on his town's cobblestone streets are as exuberant as they are wild, and his audition at the Royal Ballet School in London provides a sly counterpoint to a similar scene in "Flashdance," when Jennifer Beals somehow wows the ballet panel with a rock 'n' roll aerobics routine. When Billy performs his own wiggy dance here, you (and he) are painfully eager to know what the apparently flabbergasted judges think.
The supporting cast also is uniformly strong, with Walters delivering a typically gritty performance and Lewis turning what might have been a boilerplate father figure into someone who grows in dimension in surprising ways.
The movie includes an unnecessary coda that jumps ahead several years; the filmmakers should have let our imaginations do the work. But otherwise "Billy Elliot" is a triumph that deserves a broad audience (although it received a wrong-headed R rating for language).
Such crowd-pleasing tales are deceptively tough to make; most filmmakers wind up pushing predictable buttons to elicit predictable audience reactions. "Billy Elliot" earns its sentiment by vividly reconstructing the conflicts of a specific time and place while showing the artistic birth of someone raised in that environment. It's enough to inspire you to go home and jump on your bed.
Directed by Stephen Daldry; written by Lee Hall; photographed by Brian Tufano; edited by John Wilson; production designed by Maria Djurkovic; music by Stephen Warbeck; produced by Greg Brenman, John Finn. A Universal release; opens Friday. Running time: 1:49. MPAA rating: R (language).
Billy ................ Jamie Bell
Mrs. Wilkinson ....... Julie Walters
Tony ................. Jamie Draven
Dad .................. Gary Lewis
Grandma .............. Jean Heywood
Michael .............. Stuart Wells