Rent Billy Elliot (2000)

Heartwarming Social Drama - Billy Elliot review by GI

Because of the subsequent stage musical and it's huge popularity its often easy to forget this original film is much more than a story about a working class boy becoming a ballet dancer against the odds. Billy Elliot is really a serious social drama and one of the few films that really gets to grips with the social upheaval of the Miner's Strike which thrust apart communities, families and created huge political divides throughout the UK and which still resonate to this day. There are no outside scenes in this film where the police are not in evidence like an occupying army although the film carefully manages to avoid making any gestures about the rights and wrongs of the strike or the law enforcement actions. It does look very closely at the impact on the small Elliot family where widowed father Jackie (Gary Lewis) and older son Tony (Jamie Draven) are striking miners, struggling to make ends meet but determined to see the strike through even risking conflict with former friends who have been forced back to work by hardship. We see much of this through the child's viewpoint of Jackie's younger son Billy. Without his mother and with only a grandmother with dementia as a female role model he looks destined to have a life with little hope. Until that is he meets Mrs Wilkinson (Julie Walters) and secretly joins her ballet class. From this simple story you get a really heart warming story of growing up, of parental and familial love, of friendship and of success through defying the odds. Occasionally Billy is painted as a little too rough and ready to create a contrast with the world he wants to join and the final coda of the film never lets us into how he has overcome this. But this remains a great British film about a troubled time and it deserves continued recognition.