Mr Burton Review
“I owe him everything.” The words on the screen at the end of Marc Evans’s Mr Burton belong to actor Richard Burton talking about his English teacher at school. Philip Burton coached and inspired him to fulfil his dreams of being an actor and gave him his name.
Born Richard Jenkins in a South Wales mining village, the young Richard was a typically cheeky, somewhat rebellious teenager, but he loved literature and, as his teacher soon noticed, had a talent for acting. Coming from an impoverished family for whom education was a luxury meant that the chance of fulfilling that promise was severely limited. As well as coaching him in essential acting skills and nurturing that love of literature, his teacher took things one step further, adopting the boy so that he also took his name and, freed of the stigma of the pit village, he qualified for a scholarship that took him to Oxford. The Richard Burton who was to become one of Britain’s greatest actors was on his way.
The inspirational teacher is a familiar story, but the film approaches it from a different angle, with Philip Burton (Toby Jones) prevented from living his own theatrical dreams because of the onset of war, but doing the next best thing and experiencing them second hand. And, while the teacher in him finds satisfaction and pride in the success of his student, the frustrated actor inside is never far from the surface, so the combination of jealousy and resentment puts strains on their relationship as Richard’s (Harry Lawtey) career starts to flourish. Nods towards Pygmalion are never far away but come with a certain coziness, the sense that we’re watching a safe and comfortable version of their story. It’s respectful, sure, but given the actor’s hell-raising reputation, it’s disappointingly reluctant to bring us closer to the real man.
In a film of two halves, the first gives us Richard’s teenage years in meticulous detail, almost as if we’re reading his own personal diary, but it’s all too much, slowing down the narrative and the film as a whole. And, after an hour of measured storytelling, we’re asked to make the leap from South Wales to Stratford Upon Avon and the few weeks in the run-up to the most important performance of his rapidly developing career. Gone is that ponderous pace to be replaced by a frantic race towards the finish line and the change is so radical it’s almost as if we are watching a separate film. And, while the remarkable speaking voice that singled out the actor starts to develop in the first half, it’s suddenly fully formed, so we’re cheated out of learning where it really came from. Lawtey, to his credit, doesn’t give us an impersonation but creates more than enough to conjure up memories.
Inevitably, the film relies heavily on its two lead performances and they both deliver, Jones especially. Such is his skill that all the camera has to do is linger on his expression at any given moment and his thoughts and feelings are transparently clear. But the rest of the cast, especially Lesley Manville, are never really given a chance to breathe by a script that only allows them to be either sketchy outlines or, worse still, caricatures. Richard’s alcoholic father, Dic Jenkins (Steffan Rhodri), falls into the latter category and is painted as the villain of the piece, pure and simple.
It also suffers from some dubious visuals in the shape of the multiple chimneys at the pits and the steelworks. They dominate the skyline and the message is clear – “You can take the man out of Port Talbot, but you can’t take Port Talbot out of the man” – but their execution is clumsy and unconvincing. In their own way, they sum up the film: the ideas are sound, and the talent promises much, but it falls short of bringing us close to the reality of either of the men at the centre of the story.
★★ 1/2
In UK cinemas from 4 April / Toby Jones, Harry Lawtey, Lesley Manville, Aneurin Bernard, Aimee-Ffion Edwards / Dir: Marc Evans / Icon Film Distribution / 12A
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