As the polarised reactions to Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark have demonstrated, one person’s tragedy is another’s melodrama; one person’s deeply moving is another’s irksomely sentimental. If melodrama is tragedy that fails to move one, then sentimentality is emotion to which you do not respond. Sometimes that’s because it is fake and/or overstated; sometimes that’s just because what you’d rather be watching is a Schwarzenegger vehicle with explosions instead of feelings.
It is interesting to compare Dancer in the Dark with Billy Elliot (original title: Dancer) – and not just because of the argument about melodrama and sentimentality. Both contrast a depressed and deprived existence with the opportunity for escape provided by music and dance. Dancer in the Dark, however, pushes those two thematic poles as far apart as possible, making the reality truly dire and the musical escape a mere fantasy of freedom and wholeness. In Billy Elliot, the two strands are more closely intertwined, placed in dialogue or dialectic, and so a more involving dramatic tension develops.
In fact, the movement of Billy Elliot is toward the eventual integration of those two adjacent but antagonistic worlds. Less simplistically and more ambivalently, this is a feel-good movie in the manner of that other British movie to be a surprise United States hit, The Full Monty – not a feel-bad movie like Dancer in the Dark. Wisely, Billy Elliot gives us something to root for, a goal in sight, instead of making us despairing witnesses to inevitability. If that makes it more manipulative, it also makes it more cathartic.
The titular Billy (Jamie Bell) is an 11-year-old boy living with his widowed father, his brother and his slightly dilly grandma in Durham in the industrial north of England in the mid-Eighties. Dad and brother are coal-miners; they are engaged in the famous and famously bitter strike action that was one of the great class battles of Margaret Thatcher’s reign.
As befits constructs of masculinity in that milieu, Billy is learning to box. Significantly, he is using his father’s boxing gloves, which were passed down from his father. Masculinity runs in the family. But Billy is ”a disgrace to those gloves”, as his boxing coach puts it – he would much rather join the girls in the ballet class led by the caustic but benign Mrs Wilkinson (Julie Walters, playing the opposite role to her Rita in Educating Rita).
This leads to the inevitable conflict with dad (a finely nuanced performance from Gary Lewis) and disgust from Billy’s rather brutal brother (Jamie Draven). Yet as they struggle with Billy’s determination to dance, they confront their own definitions of masculinity. The way this is articulated in the context of the miners’ strike is masterfully done, as is the gentle way the issue of sexuality is handled.
Lee Hall’s script and Stephen Daldry’s direction are marvellous, but they would have come to naught without Bell. His is a performance remarkable in every way, balanced on the cusp of childishness and maturity, teetering between awkwardness and grace. He has the energy for the role’s physicality as well as a mobile, expressive face: when he breaks into a grin, especially after some brow-furrowing worry, one just wants to hug him.
The dancing itself expresses feeling as it would in a musical, though here it disturbs without quite rupturing the naturalistic narrative. Frustrated with his father’s refusal to let him continue ballet lessons, Billy erupts into a spontaneous sequence that is not entirely realistic, but utterly compelling on the emotional level. Likewise, the passages of cross-cutting in which, say, Billy’s dance routines are juxtaposed with fighting at the picket lines may seem a little too authorial, but they work beautifully to crystallise the story’s themes.
Its narrative trajectory may be a tad obvious, and elements of it implausible, but the film’s inexorable emotional pull renders the debate about sentimentality redundant. You may well find yourself snivelling happily at a couple of points in Billy Elliot – then cheering. It also has the best wallpaper you’ll see outside a Pedro Almod-var picture.