Mr Burton, review: Toby Jones is affecting as the man who changed Richard Burton's life

Telegraph

03-04-2025

Before Richard Burton became the most famous actor Wales has ever produced, he was Richard Jenkins, a nondescript miner's boy from Port Talbot, who nearly didn't finish school in the early 1940s.
How he would transform and flourish into the Burton of legend is down to the man who gave him the surname – or so Mr Burton, Marc Evans's affecting, almost soothingly staid new biopic has it.
This other Burton, variously known as Philip or 'PH', was an English teacher, mentor, de facto stepfather, and provider of the career encouragement a brooding youngster sorely needed to have any confidence in himself that didn't come from the bottle.
Toby Jones plays this guardian angel with a meticulous sadness. His acting is so gathered and precise – important, given that he's here to dispense performance notes, on elocution, bearing, and all the other basics. In voice coaching sessions on Margam Mountain, we watch him sculpt Harry Lawtey's Richard from slovenly raw material, dropping his aitches, into a princeling who can project.
Both know there's more to acting than aspirating, of course. The uneven fist that Lawtey (star of Industry) makes of Burton actually fits the story: he's a little prone to winsome pouting at first, but we start with Jenkins at an embryonic 17, and an upfront impersonation would be jumping the gun. There are later shots, when his cheekbones are lit just right and a forelock flops just so, when the resemblance is uncanny, and a few flurries of rage when he lands that percussive snappishness quite well.
Even so, it's squarely Jones's film. He's playing a confirmed bachelor with a lonely streak a mile wide, and yet coarser speculation begins and ends here with the wagging of tongues at the pair's domestic arrangements.
Before bribing his pupil's hard-boozing father (Steffan Rhodri) to make the young Jenkins his legal ward – cue a switch of surnames to help him into Oxford – PH paid for the lad to co-habit at a boarding house, which his landlady (an obliging Lesley Manville) warns him is guaranteed to look fishy.
The film wants us to believe in the older man's altruism – a commendable choice to take the high road in the absence of evidence to the contrary, but the script hardly flatters him by portraying him as an implied closet case whose protégé left him behind.
Before Richard was the toast of Stratford with his Hal in the RSC's 1951 Henry IV, the film imagines him spurning his real-life father figure in a drunken strop – an inverse entwining of art and life that asks us to believe he found special pathos in that role.
It also makes us wonder whether Burton's internalised homophobia – well-attested in biographies – sprung from the friendship, explained it, or both. He never thought acting was a manly profession, and seemed to be involved in a tug-of-war against himself, tangled up by his roots. To have half explored these themes, as Evans' film does, means we're left wanting more, but there's a pleasing ache to the experience as a platonic love story.