HOWZAT

Meanwhile his older son Tony (Jamie Draven) is on the picket lines as usual, and learns of his father's betrayal, or martyrdom, only when he and his mates are giving the bus a good shaking. This scene is strenuously staged, but that can't roughen the essential glibness of the conflict.

There's a fine comic moment late on in the film, when the principal at the Royal Ballet School (Patrick Malahide) says to Billy's Dad at the end of the audition, "Good luck with the strike", as if it was a new production of The Tales of Beatrix Potter. But the joke at the expense of Southern aesthetes would be sharper if the film didn't soft-pedal the politics at will. The strike, which was a formative experience for the screenwriter, giving Hall an indignation which has fuelled much of his work, has been reduced to the status of a backdrop, almost a prop. Of course Billy Elliot is far from the Comic Strip's spoof Hollywoodisation of the strike, with Al Pacino as Arthur Scargill, but it does take a few damaging steps in that direction.

Meanwhile ballet becomes the salvation not just of Billy, but of the whole family. Dad lets his emotions out and becomes something of a laughter-and tears man. Gran's dementia gets much better. A stealthy attempt is under way to warm the heart. It's the dreaded cardio-thermal creep. The oddity is that Daldry can't quite settle on a style for the film.

Even within a sequence there is likely to be one shot which jars with the others. So when Tony is running from the riot police, the tone starts off dark, with a frightening view of the rampaging police from a low angle.

Tony runs into the front doors of terraced houses, out the back way, in his attempt to escape. Then Daldry starts throwing in bits of cuteness: there's a man lifting weights in his front room, and Tony has to leap over the bench press. There's a cup of tea in someone's kitchen, and Tony helps himself in passing. That cup of tea seems to have crept in from some Ealing comedy.

It's no secret that British and American films make different assumptions about how far society determines individual lives. If a film shows people reaching their goals by learning to believe in themselves, chances are it's American, or made with an eye to the American market.

If it shows people ground down by daily pressures, their dreams evaporating, then it's not only British but made for home consumption.

Ken Loach is the clearest example of a film-maker who has stayed loyal to the more stringent, or more grudging, domestic tradition.

The breakthroughs into intimacy and connection in a film such as My Name Is Joe are hard-earned - people may turn over a new leaf, but it's still very much the same book.

Billy Elliot is not the first film to be a hybrid of the two approaches: The Full Monty started off distinctly dour, but it mutated into a classic of the feel-good tradition.

The odd thing about Billy Elliot is that the shift is less controlled. Different sequences would score a four and a nine in terms of wishful thinking - if the scale is calibrated to give a reading of one for Loach's Family Life, two for Kes and ten for Flashdance.

Empire, 15, 111 mins

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