Stephen Daldry’s Billy Elliot takes a miners’ strike, a boxing gym and a boy who would rather dance, and refuses to let any of them sit still. It is a drama that keeps breaking into comedy, a comedy that keeps breaking into grief. The film runs 111 minutes and opened in the United Kingdom on 29 September 2000. It earns its reputation. It does not earn a perfect score, and the reasons are worth naming.
Trailer, via YouTube Movies.
County Durham, 1984
The setting does most of the work before anyone speaks. Billy Elliot is set in County Durham in North East England during the 1984–1985 miners’ strike. Billy is 11, living with his widowed father Jackie, his older brother Tony, and his grandmother, who has Alzheimer’s disease. Jackie and Tony are coal miners out on strike; Tony is the union delegate.
The strike is not wallpaper. The film frames the conflict as a class war with the lower classes suffering. Lee Hall’s script, adapted from his own play Dancer, keeps the politics inside the family. Tony is arrested during a clash between police and striking miners.
A Boxing Gym and a Ballet Class
Jackie sends Billy to the gym to learn boxing. Billy dislikes the sport. He stumbles on a ballet class using the same gym, because the dancers’ usual basement studio is temporarily a soup kitchen for the striking miners. He joins out of curiosity, without telling his father.
Sandra Wilkinson teaches the class. She spots the talent fast and tells Billy he is good enough for the Royal Ballet School in London. When Jackie finds out, he forbids the lessons. Billy keeps taking them in secret.
The film’s engine is that secret, and Daldry runs it clean. Jamie Bell played an 11-year-old, and the camera stays close to him. He does not perform charm. He performs stubbornness, which is harder and better.
Jamie Bell, Julie Walters and the Cast
Bell had about seven auditions before producers announced in mid-1999 that he had the lead. Around 2,000 boys were considered. Choreographer Peter Darling worked with Bell for “eight hours a day for three months, finding out what drove him as a dancer.”
That labor shows. The dancing in Billy Elliot reads as skill, not as a montage trick.
Julie Walters plays Sandra Wilkinson and called the script “moving.” She said: “It was a diamond in the sand […] I loved the character, and the fact that she was disappointed on every level possible. She was so grim and jaded. Her relationship with the boy was so unusual.”
That relationship is the film’s second-best asset. Walters plays a teacher who is not saintly. She is tired, she is sharp, and she wants this boy to get out.
Gary Lewis plays Jackie. Lewis met with miners before filming and said his own experience of the strike made the role enjoyable. “My family and I were very active in supporting the miners: I stood in picket lines, I raised money for the miners and I was involved in the whole campaign to stop […] closing the pits,” he said. He called the state’s action “a complete attack on a section of the work force, a section of the working class,” and pointed to solidarity as “a key element in the script.”
It is. The film’s best scene is not a dance. It is a town deciding to pay for a boy’s trip.
The Turn
Jackie and Tony are outraged at the idea of Billy dancing professionally, partly because they fear he will be considered gay. The film does not soften that. Then Billy’s best friend Michael tells him he is gay, and Billy is supportive. Later Jackie catches Billy and Michael dancing in the gym and finally sees the passion for what it is.
Jackie resolves to do whatever it takes. Sandra offers to pay for the audition. He refuses: Billy is his son and he does not need charity. Jackie tries to cross the picket line to fund the London trip; Tony stops him. Instead, his fellow miners and the neighborhood raise money, and Jackie pawns Billy’s things.
That is the movie in one sequence. Pride, solidarity and sacrifice, all pulling against each other.
What Works and What Drags
Here is the part worth arguing about. Billy Elliot is a coming-of-age film about a working-class boy with a passion for ballet, and its father objects based on negative stereotypes of male ballet dancers. That premise could have produced two hours of shouting. Hall avoids it by making the father’s resistance economic and social rather than cartoonish.
The weakness is the middle. Once Billy’s secret is out and the audition is set, the film loses some of its friction. The strike keeps pressing, but the family drama starts resolving ahead of schedule. A few scenes state their theme rather than earn it.
The other issue is tone. Billy Elliot is classed as drama, comedy and music, and it wants all three at once. The comedy mostly lands, especially around Michael and the boxing gym. But the shifts can be abrupt, and the film’s darker material sometimes gets handled with a lighter touch than it deserves.
The Numbers
- Runtime: 111 minutes
- Budget: $5 million
- Worldwide gross: $109.3 million
- Cannes premiere: 2000
- UK theatrical release: 29 September 2000
- BAFTA wins: 3 wins from 13 nominations
- Academy Award nominations: 3
- Metacritic: 74/100
Where It Stands
Billy Elliot premiered at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival and began a wider UK release on 29 September 2000 through Universal Pictures and United International Pictures. It was a co-production among BBC Films, Tiger Aspect Pictures and Working Title Films, produced by Greg Brenman and Jon Finn, with a score by Stephen Warbeck.
The awards record is the tell. At the 54th British Academy Film Awards, the film won three of thirteen nominations. Jamie Bell became the youngest winner of Best Actor in a Leading Role. At the 73rd Academy Awards it earned three nominations including Best Director and Best Original Screenplay.
Three BAFTA wins is not a sweep. It is a film that many people admired and few could agree on how to reward.
- Jamie Bell as Billy Elliot — the reason the film still works.
- Julie Walters as Sandra Wilkinson — the sharpest performance in the cast.
- Gary Lewis as Jackie Elliot — the film’s emotional turn.
- Lee Hall’s screenplay — strong premise, soft middle.
- Stephen Daldry’s direction — confident with actors, uneven with tone.
Ranked against the coming-of-age films it gets compared to, Billy Elliot sits high but not at the top. Its best scenes are about a community choosing a child over its own pride, and those scenes are genuinely moving. Its weakest scenes explain what the good scenes already showed.
What stays with you is not the audition and not the final dance. It is Jackie on the picket line, then Jackie off it, ready to break with the men beside him for a son he spent most of the film misunderstanding. The film’s politics and its family story only truly meet there, in one man’s decision to be wrong in public. Everything before it is setup. Everything after it is release.
Billy Elliot earns a 7.4 of 10.
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