Jamie Bell and Julie Walters make Billy Elliot a funny, moving film about a boy being taken seriously. We recommend it for them and the dancing, with some patience required for the sentiment and the cautious politics.
Stephen Daldry’s Billy Elliot follows a familiar route through a boy’s talent, his family’s resistance and the encouragement of a teacher. It is a warm, funny film that earns much of its emotion through Jamie Bell, even when Lee Hall’s screenplay is working too hard to secure the rest. Set in a northern English mining town during the 1984 strike, it puts Billy’s desire to dance alongside the adults’ struggle over work. Giving both subjects enough attention proves difficult, and the boy gets considerably more.
Bell makes Billy’s talent convincing without making him seem like an adult’s idea of an exceptional child. There is something stubborn and untidy about the performance that helps when the story starts arranging itself too neatly around him. We felt properly exhilarated by his dancing, because the effort and eagerness remain visible throughout the routines. Brian Tufano’s cinematography serves him well: the movement is clear, and we stay interested in what Billy is feeling while his body is occupied.
Julie Walters gives Mrs Wilkinson the briskness this sort of story needs. Her interest in Billy does not require her to become gentle or endlessly agreeable, and their scenes have room for comedy as well as instruction. Hall writes their relationship with a warmth that feels less forced than some of the family confrontations, while Daldry allows both performers to be awkward. The teacher takes the boy seriously, and Walters makes that attention matter without asking us to admire her for giving it.
Gary Lewis also does useful work as Billy’s father, Jackie, finding fear beneath objections that could have been merely blustering. Jamie Draven’s Tony is a harsher presence, and the writing gives him less space to be anything else. Hall understands how family loyalty can make an apparently private choice feel like a rejection, but the arguments occasionally divide people into those who understand Billy and those who need educating. Those scenes are easier to predict than the performances deserve.
The dance sequences benefit from John Wilson’s editing, which gives the physical excitement a pace the more familiar dramatic passages can lack. The glam-rock songs help: their directness suits Billy’s energy, and we do not need every movement translated into a lesson about freedom. Stephen Warbeck’s music reinforces the tenderness, sometimes too insistently when the actors have already made the feeling clear. Daldry’s eagerness to move us becomes a nuisance in passages that would work with less encouragement.
Maria Djurkovic’s production design keeps the mining-town setting credible, even when the script risks reducing its inhabitants to obstacles for Billy. The strike scenes carry a tension that the family arguments cannot produce on their own, yet Hall and Daldry remain cautious about the dispute itself. They use it more readily to establish hardship than to explore what is being fought for. We understand the boy’s ambitions far better than the convictions of the adults around him.
As a story about a talented child meeting resistance, Billy Elliot knows most of the reliable ways to please an audience, and uses rather too many of them. Bell and Walters supply enough humour and irritation to stop the sentiment becoming unbearable. Watch it for their company and for the dancing; leave the expectation of a searching account of the strike behind.
