What a strange predicament! It’s either ballet or the coal mines for Billy Elliot.  Or at least, that’s how the charming thirteen-year-old star of this eponymous debut feature film from English stage director Stephen Daldry seems to see it. 

It’s 1984 and Billy (the enchanting and talented Jamie Bell) lives in County Durham, North England, with his father and brother, striking coal miners and loyal unionists, and his slightly demented grandmother (Jean Heywood).  His mother has passed away and has taken with her the music of the house—literally and figuratively.  One day, when he’s supposed to be attending boxing classes at the community hall, Billy happens upon a ballet class and falls in love.

And so, despite his father’s and the community’s disapproval, Billy pursues his formal dance training with the sharp-tongued, chain-smoking Mrs. Wilkinson (played brilliantly by Julie Walters, of Educating Rita fame) as his mentor.  Saddled with an unhappy marriage, teaching the ballet positions to a group of tutu-clad daughters of coal miners, Mrs. Wilkinson is apparently none too happy with her lot in life.  But in Billy she sees something of promise and therefore encourages him, in her own curt way, from the beginning.

So, it is Billy and his ballet (pronounced like “Bali”), against the world.  Except this is a quirky world that Billy inhabits.  His best friend, Michael (Stuart Wells), is a social misfit with some gender identity issues.  Billy and Michael are concerned that they not be considered “puffs”—an issue of concern for Billy, who loves ballet, and Michael, who loves dressing in his sister’s clothing.  The question of sexuality is one that the film steps lightly around.  Billy is uninterested in the furtive approaches of the ballet teacher’s daughter, Debbie (Nicola Blackwell).  But he insists throughout the film that he is no “puff.”  How then, can a boy from a working-class family define his masculinity when his interests do not fit within community convention?   Throughout the film, men grapple with different methods for proving their masculinity.  Billy’s father and brother, as well as many of the other men in the community, assert their maleness through their work and their hobbies—mining, drinking, and boxing.  But this is a topsy-turvy time for the Elliot men and their peers.

Billy’s loving but tough and uncomprehending father, Jackie (Gary Lewis), and brother, Tony (Jamie Draven), are embroiled in a fight for their livelihoods.  Daldry shows the striking miners jeering, yelling, and throwing eggs at the scabs’ bus each morning.  And Billy’s town is crawling with police in riot gear through the duration of the film.  Tony is a militant, while Jackie has a wearier approach to the situation.  But one thing is sure: scabs are the scum of the earth.  Tony runs into his former best friend, a scab, at the supermarket and sneers that “scabs eat well” as he eyes his friend’s full shopping cart. 

Times are tight for the Elliots, but it’s even worse than that since, the strike, as the film indicates all along, is hopeless.  Jackie and Tony are fighting a losing battle to protect their way of life, their livelihood, and their dignity.  And here’s little Billy and his ballet—presumably yet another intrusion on their sense of masculine identity.  Billy twists a knife in his father’s heart when he rejects boxing, finds ballet instead, and then defies Jackie’s edict to stop dancing.  At a time when Jackie and Tony are being denied their ability to work and earn a livelihood, Billy stretches the test on their teetering masculine egos one step further.

This is the story of following your dreams, of triumph over adversity.  As such, the film is uplifting, and it accomplishes its ostensible goal.  Yet, the moral of the story is dubious.  Escape is possible only through a culture that is foreign, if not anathema to the rugged coal miners.  It is only by escaping to London that Billy can evade his future of coal mining.  The film sidesteps an important question: Is it really all over for north England coal miners?  Has the world economic situation changed in such a way that there truly is no option for a boy like Billy except to escape his hometown?  This film really ought to be about what happens to a family, and a community, when the primary means of livelihood is exhausted.  It is a problematic topic—and not one that the movie is willing, or perhaps able, to tackle.  Instead, silent chaos reigns in the Elliot family.   It is not possible for people like Tony and Jackie to even understand ballet.  They are capable of seeing Billy’s love for it, but the dance itself is incomprehensible.  “He might be a genius,” Jackie yells at one point, in his frustration.  These are the words of confusion, not pride.  Jackie can’t really see his own son.

Jackie insists that he, and not the bourgeois Mrs. Wilkinson, be the one who helps Billy attain his dancing dreams.  Here, the working-class father refuses charity, well-intentioned though it may be.  Accepting help from Mrs. Wilkinson would be tantamount to admitting an inability to support his family – the ultimate male failure.  It is important that the help Jackie receives is from his own community, the other striking miners. Billy’s dad’s plight is a heartrending one: he wishes to provide for his son, even when he doesn’t understand Billy’s needs. Jackie’s love for his son is blind—he does not understand Billy, but he tries anyway.  He does finally come to understand that because his wife has passed away, he must play the role of the mother, too, by  nurturing and supporting Billy, even though it does not come easily.  Like Billy, Jackie must struggle with his “feminine” side. 

Once he has decided to help his son, Jackie makes the bitterest decision of his life—to scab in order to pay for Billy’s audition expenses.  The irony is thick, in that Jackie decides to betray his friends and community in order to support a profession that seems to make a mockery of his own work and values.  In a scene of great poignancy, Billy’s father is resolute in his determination to provide for his son.  The conflict is all too real: choosing between supporting one’s family and sticking with the union is a realistic choice for a striking unionist.  The additional pain here is Jackie’s torture of not understanding what he is sacrificing for, since ballet not only  is foreign to him but represents a high culture from which he is so alienated that he cannot fathom what its role in his life could be.  And Jackie fears what he does not understand.  The ballet afficianados in London represent money and power; thus, they, and not Jackie and his mates, are society’s truly “strong” men. When Jackie takes his son to London, he must stare the boss whom he has never met in the face, and it is a terrifying and confusing moment.

With all of this silence and stilted understanding of art, it’s a good thing that Daldry is willing to show the audience what art is nonverbally.  The direction and cinematography are exquisite—the film often communicates using light and music, instead of words.   The furrow-browed Jamie Bell does his bit too.  In one silent and visually arresting sequence, the music pounds as Billy’s inability to stop dancing despite his family’s disapproval is demonstrated physically.  Bell’s Billy beats the pavement and the walls with his feet as he tries to dance out his dancing—dance till he can dance no more—in defiance, or frustration.  Daldry uses the tricks of the theater, including an elaborately staged and stylized chase scene, to create visual splendor.  He even manages to turn the bleakness of the miners’ houses and the starkness of the coal-built County Durham town into an aesthetic asset.    

This dramatization of silence and romanticizing of the physical trappings of poverty are the tools that the film uses.  The fact is, Billy’s story is an old trope of overcoming poverty and lack of understanding from the world.  Yet if this film had been made in the United States, would it have taken this stance toward striking union members?  Is there a popular film in recent memory from Hollywood, outside of Norma Rae, where a labor dispute has been viewed so sympathetically?  In England, the historical strength of industrial unions and the left-wing intelligentsia’s outrage over the brutal repression of the coal miners’ strikes of the early 1980s, enable this story to make a little more sense.  After all, this is a movie made by a member of England’s cultural elite—Daldry is one of Britain’s preeminent theater directors and the Arts Council of England co-produced the film. Nonetheless, working people are not demonized.   The Full Monty and Brassed Off are other recent British cinema exports that manage to convey the plight of the disempowered, male, British industrial worker.   People in the English film industry seem aware, then, that there is a crisis of working-class masculinity, and they are sympathetic.  Yet it is always a delicate balance between sympathy and condescension.

Class conflicts don’t make this tightrope walk a simple one. When Billy encounters ballet professionals for an audition, he and his father are overwhelmed and intimidated by the poshness of the elegant Royal Ballet School.  When a Royal Ballet School official awkwardly wishes Jackie “good luck with the strike,” the coal miner stares back at this embodiment of high culture with a hostile and astonished look.  These two men—Jackie and the ballet official—understand nothing of each other.  Who are these compassionate purveyors of high art who condescend to the working class as they try to “understand” them?  Perhaps they are some of us, who watch this film.

When all’s said and done, this is an attractive and entertaining film that is deeply sensitive to the financial and emotional hardships that a strike can bring to a union family.  Yet the plot and characters are not nuanced.  The film itself falls too easily into predictable plot patterns and the characters, into caricatures.  It’s unfortunate that the film relies on stereotypes of coal miners as men who understand drinking, boxing, mining, and nothing else.

The film’s charm and good nature can easily trick the viewer into believing that she has watched a happy movie, with a Hollywood ending.  But the murky underbelly that lies beneath the sugar-coated ending cannot be escaped.  For an ostensibly pro-union movie, this film manages to fail to understand the meaning of unity.  The only way out of Billy’s ghetto is escape (in America it would be a sports scholarship).  Billy Elliot undoubtedly raises—but deftly avoids—addressing the deeper issues stirred by Billy’s dancing success.  If there’s no hope left in coal mining, what about all of the boys in north England who don’t get to ballet dance their way out, what about the boys and girls who are left behind?