Mr Burton
“What the hell do you think spies are?!” When Richard Burton spits that they are merely “a bunch of seedy, squalid bastards like me” in 1965’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, it cannot help but carry a bitter ring of self-excoriating confession from an actor who once declared “You may be as vicious about me as you please. You will only do me justice”. Watching Burton in Mike Nichols’s seminal Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, his eyes carry a reptilian coolness, his voice often something close to a sneering rasp of condescension, even and perhaps especially when appearing to be friendly. Onscreen and off of it, the actor was a resolutely, magnetically un-cuddly figure, which begs the question of how fitting a treatment as cosily teatime-friendly as Marc Evans’s Mr Burton truly can be.
Trepidation sets in early at first sounding of John ER Hardy’s twinkling score, accompanying Toby Jones’s lonely professor on his melancholy way to his professional rounds at Port Talbot Secondary School, Wales. As he takes a fond shine to eager, forthright student Richard Jenkins (Harry Lawtey), Hardy’s score assures us in advance of the story’s emotional trajectory, the melting of stiff upper lip reserve for the Burton that already is and the embrace of purpose for the Burton to be both rendered as foregone conclusions. The score inveigles itself into the revelatory moment of discovery where headstrong young Jenkins first reads for the old man’s acting class, and later into the two’s harshest disputes. Little is left for audiences to feel for themselves.
When taking stock of the dynamic between Burton and the tempestuous aspiring actor who would become his legal ward, there is much for a film to plum. For all the comforting Pygmalion rhythms of Burton schooling Jenkins in the shedding of his working-class speech in favour of stage-friendly elocution, and the redemptive potential the teacher finds therein, there is also the hint of something sadder and less easily resolved. The men have come to one another in search of something, but it may not be a surrogate family so much as a ticket out of their lives as they are. Through his student, Burton may be hoping – with no small amount of concealed resentment – to vicariously realise his own thwarted acting ambitions, while Jenkins sets upon fashioning Burton into the father figure he has always lacked. Still, thornier and more difficult emotions are allowed only the briefest moments to grow before being promptly flattened by familiar, sweeping Brit Dram efficiency.
For their parts, Jones is in stolidly dependable form, but with so broad a dramatic outline, Lawtey is left to journey from slack-jawed adolescent naivete to a fitful impression of the haughty, rakish Burton we know with little in between to grasp. Come the last act, he appears stranded in caricature, the film around him having already concluded that the diagrammatic, originating psychological malady of Richard Burton’s life was simply that “when push comes to shove, nobody wants me”.
A competent, largely well-acted bio-drama of Richard Burton’s origins, Mr Burton nonetheless feels too tidy, too polite to properly accommodate its subject. Come its end, one wishes only to take another look at the real thing in his element onscreen, which may add up to a mission accomplished regardless.
Thomas Messner
Mr Burton is released in select cinemas on 4th April 2025.
Watch the trailer for Mr Burton here:
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