BILLY ELLIOT

“And what do you like about ballet?” the stony-faced examiner at the Royal Ballet School asks 11-year-old Billy Elliot (Jamie Bell), who’s fought his way to an audition from the coal-smudged alleys of the north of England. Groping for a serious enough answer, he finally blurts out, “The dancing.” And it’s the dancing that transfigures Stephen Daldry’s movie about being different in a world of sameness.

Although music from Swan Lake is heard throughout, we don’t see even a snippet of high ballet — and neither has Billy until his fateful audition. His life is bleak and comfortless, and the family — robbed of their mother at the beginning of the film — sink into poverty as a miners’ strike drags into the winter months. Grandma (Jean Heywood) is halfway to dementia; older brother Tony (Jamie Draven) and father (Gary Lewis), locked in silent machismo, get more and more furious at the union’s impotence — and their own.

When Billy accidentally wanders into a local dancing class taught by the bored and discouraged Mrs. Wilkinson (Julie Walters), it absorbs his pre-adolescent energy and anger better than a punching bag or a trampoline. Frustrated but with a mysterious determination to learn, he begins to conquer his body, and he understands how much this means. Every crisis in his struggle to keep his new identity is a dance: his boogie duet with his teacher, his first pirouette, his kicking slamming rage when his father finds out and forbids him to continue.

The dance of Billy’s initiation into ballet is intercut with the mass violence of the miners’ strike. Little girls in tutus twinkling their toes alternate with mobs of strikers hurling eggs at a bus full of scabs. Ballet is somehow tangled up with sexuality too — all the men he knows think ballet dancers are poufs. His school friend Michael likes to dress up in his mum’s clothes. Debbie, the teacher’s precocious daughter, offers to let him see her bum. Billy is confused about everything except that he wants to keep on dancing.

Thirteen-year-old Jamie Bell is no exquisite ballet boy. He doesn’t miraculously achieve perfection. His dance is awkward, blustery, flung wildly all over the room, with everything he’s ever seen thrown in: ballet, boogie, clogging. It’s also instinctively expressive — rough and earnest and beautiful.

— Marcia B. Siegel