Never fully comes to life, alas: Mr Burton reviewed

Mr Burton is a biopic of Richard Burton’s early years and an origins story, if you like. It stars Harry Lawtey as young Richard and Toby Jones as Philip Burton, the inspirational teacher whose name he would take. It’s a fascinating story. In essence, Richard’s drunkard father sold him for £50. But the film is too devoted and sedate to fly as a cinematic event. It has the feel of a Sunday evening television drama. Nothing wrong with that – although you could just stay home on a Sunday evening and watch television if that’s what you’re after. Cheaper, and much less bother.

Burton was born Richard Jenkins – the twelfth of 13 children – whose mother died when he was two years old. (From exhaustion, I suspect.) His father (Steffan Rhodri), a miner and 12-pints-a-day man, immediately booted him out to be brought up by an older sister (Aimee-Ffion Edwards) and her begrudging husband (Aneurin Barnard). That’s where he’s living when we first meet him at around 16. (Lawtey was in his late twenties at the time of filming so accepting him as a schoolboy isn’t easy but needs must.) This is Port Talbot where the landscape is dominated by industrial chimneys constantly belching out black smoke. However, it speaks less of the life of grind and grime that might await him and more of the perils of cheap CGI. The period details are otherwise lovely, I should add.

Richard attends the secondary school where Philip Burton teaches English. He first notes his raw talent when he gives him the prologue from Henry V to learn as a punishment and he not only returns word perfect the next day but says: ‘I bloody loved it!’ Shakespeare makes him feel alive. Mr Burton takes him under his wing. He teaches him to project. He tutors the Welsh accent out of him. (Fair play to Lawtey: his voice does become more and more Burton-esque.) Eventually, Richard even moves into his lodgings where the landlady is played by Lesley Manville. There’s too little Manville here for my liking but then there is always too little Manville for my liking.

Directed by Marc Evans and written by Tom Bullough and Josh Hyams, the film hits the familiar beats. The tiffs, the setbacks, the family that think he should have an honest job. At one point he’s forced to leave school and become a draper’s assistant down the Co-op. His heart was never in it. He’d have never become a draper proper, I don’t think. It’s almost all here. What it lacks is any serious interrogation into the exact nature of the relationship. Was it ever sexual? Some say it definitely was, but even though the village gossips and Richard’s own father calls him a ‘poofter’, it’s all waved away. Philip is a good man, a selfless man, a man who only wants others to flourish, end of. (Kate Burton, one of Richard’s daughters, who was involved with the film, has given an interview to the Radio Times where she refers to Philip’s ‘homosexuality’. That isn’t even alluded to here.)

Richard’s own drinking and self-destructive behaviours are all put down to the moment Philip had to pay his father £50 to become his legal guardian. That would piss anyone off but it still feels as if there is a void at the centre of the character; that something is not being said.

The performances are solid. I’m not sure Lawtey fully capture’s Richard Burton’s charisma – who could? – but he does convey a simmering intensity and by the time we leave the story, at the beginning of Richard’s fame, he has captured something of the essence, particularly when it comes to his voice and physical swagger. Philip Burton is hardly a stretch for Toby Jones but if you want someone to embody decency there is, of course, no one better.

In other words, it is all perfectly serviceable but it never, alas, fully comes to life.