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The publicity campaign is calling it “this year’s Full Monty” and “a Waking Ned Devine for the millennium.” (Ever notice that you never see anything billed as “this year’s Citizen Kane” or “for everyone who loved Last Year at Marienbad?) That’s all well and good, but it remains to be seen if a very English movie about ballet will prove as popular in the U.S. as very English movies about stripping and gambling.
Disarmingly earnest newcomer Jamie Bell plays Billy, an indomitable 11-year-old whose sympathies are obvious from an opening credit sequence that finds him jumping up and down on his bed to the strains of T. Rex’s “Cosmic Dancer.” It’s the mid-1980s, and Billy’s dad and brother are striking coal miners in northern England who somehow make sure he has 50p. a week for boxing lessons, because Grandad and dad were boxers so Billy will be too, by God. It’s a burden Billy bears with a remarkable lack of enthusiasm until the day a ballet class interrupts his gym workout, and instantly he’s got a new reason to live. Sneaking around with the tacit complicity of his teacher (Julie Walters, who won a Golden Globe and an Oscar nom for Educating Rita), he hones his raw, exuberant talent to the point where she thinks he deserves a tryout with the Royal Ballet School in London. Which is just about the last thing Billy’s red-faced, poofter-intolerant dad wants to hear. So there’s your basic plot conflict.
What a find this kid is. Bell dances through streets and alleys of his impoverished burg – reminiscent of the setting for Brassed Off – with untrained but joyous abandon. His comic timing has a wonderful, naturally unforced quality that simply can’t be taught, which would put Haley Joel Osment out of work if it weren’t for an intervening ocean. As to whether or not Billy Elliot can steal as many American hearts as did the titles invoked in its press kit, that’s a tough call. The free preview I saw was heavy with folks who didn’t seem like regular filmgoers (I’m only guessing; but their incessant Ma and Pa Kettle Go to Town narration of the onscreen proceedings would probably have gotten them mugged by now if they’d carried on so among very many paying audiences) but had a good time and weren’t noticeably bothered by working-class Englishers’ quintessential casualness with the f-word. Or by several more Marc Bolan songs likely unfamiliar to anyone who didn’t, like me, once play in a band that covered a lot of 70s glam-rock. I hope that, despite having now been told more than you want to know, you’ll give this neat little movie a chance anyway. B+
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