‘Mr Burton’ — When Richard Burton Was Richard Jenkins

The biopic is, at this point, a well-worn genre. We all know the pattern. The stirrings of talent and ambition, the stress of fame and fortune, maybe some belated form of emotional recovery. Mr. Burton has a relatively novel take on the formula, however, as we never actually see the legendary actor Richard Burton (Harry Lawtey) get famous. Indeed, for most of the movie, he isn’t even Richard Burton.

Richard Jenkins is just a Welsh teenager growing up in forties-era Port Talbot — a steel town on the South Wales coast. And he’s not even the sole title character. That honor he shares with Philip Burton (Toby Jones), an aging schoolmaster and former stage actor who reluctantly takes on teaching work.

The United Kingdom is at war and the country needs authoritative schoolmasters to train their students to become soldiers more than they need actors. Philip satisfies his dramatic ambitions by lending his powerful voice to the regional BBC affiliate and managing a local acting troupe, even if it’s clear his heart still yearns for his old days on the national stage.

Mr. Burton goes to surprising pains to avoid being an inspiring story. Jenkins is challenged at school by Burton, for example, as the narrative might expect. But he’s not really all that bad a pupil. Jenkins’ troubles mainly derive from his home life. Jenkins’ father, the perpetually drunken widower, Dic Jenkins (Steffan Rhodri) isn’t much help to his son. Jenkins lives with his sister’s family, including a heavily-built, coal miner brother-in-law Elfed (Aneurin Barnard) who grumbles about Jenkins not pulling his weight in the household finances. He also shows suspicion of the English and their theater, though Elfed’s argument is, by his own admission, undercut by the fact that Jenkins can speak Welsh and Elfed can’t.

The film makes it clear that Jenkins’ teenage behavior is cut some slack by pretty much everyone because this is the forties. Jenkins, and every other teenager in this movie, is likely to be shipped out to die in World War II before too long. This sets a grim overtone on how he juggles schoolwork, paid work, and his acting hobby.

Mr. Burton★★★★ (4/5 stars)
Directed by: Marc Evans
Written by: Tom Bullough, Josh Hyams
Starring: Toby Jones, Harry Lawtey, Lesley Manville
Running time: 124 minutes

Functioning more as a historical piece than a biopic, Mr. Burton is largely unconcerned with trying to convince us that stage acting is important except to the extent that it matters to the main characters. Rather, the point that Burton makes to Jenkins, time and again, is that as an instructor, his role is not to encourage his pupil, but to see if his pupil feels compelled to succeed even when discouraged. It’s a pedagogical approach that’s out of fashion, but here is deeply appealing. Jenkins has to prove that he really wants the stage actor life in part because Burton is so apprehensive about projecting his own goals onto a younger man. It’s important for Jenkins to show he wants more than just any route to approval from an authority figure.

The meat of the film is still mostly craft-driven. The scenes about acting are compelling, thanks to Toby Jones taking command of every scene he’s in with little more than an impressive sense of patience and deliberate intonation. It’s telling that Burton is never rattled, only nervous, because learning to act is precisely about being able to do things like speak loudly and authoritatively without shouting. It’s actually quite easy to see why the British government thinks that Mr. Burton is more useful as a teacher than an actor for this exact reason. Acting, in Mr. Burton, is most often about maintaining composure, which is accomplished as much through muscle memory as through the actual reading of the lines. It’s little surprise that, much like Ethel Barrymore, Richard eventually develops a drinking problem from the pressure. Again, more of a nerves problem than his being intimidated by any outside factors.

While much of Mr. Burton is technically expert, the script has a tendency to go off-topic. Welsh identity, for example, is dealt with rather explicitly, with Jenkins depicted as speaking Welsh fluently. But, with the benefit of hindsight, it’s difficult to reconcile Welsh pride with Richard Burton becoming globally famous for his work on quintessentially English plays, apparently justifying Elfed’s critique of Richard selling out. It’s a good idea, but it’s not quite developed enough to really work all that convincingly.

Elfed in general, functions as a sort of unwilling surrogate father figure to Jenkins who appreciates Philip’s influence on the boy more for financial reasons than because he cares about acting. Elfed does still appreciate that Jenkins clearly loves the craft, and doesn’t argue with his wife’s protective instincts against sending Jenkins down into the coal mine. Elfed becomes too strong a role for a movie about Richard Burton’s formative years, though, because Aneurin Barnard swaggers like he just walked out of a completely different film about Welsh coal miners.

Other parts of the script are forgettable. Jenkins has a relationship with a girl mostly to prove he’s not gay. This becomes a plot point, and is the implied cause of Richard’s alcoholism, is that he suddenly becomes paranoid that people are going to think he’s gay. The film establishes a decent queer undercurrent, it’s not such a surprise that, in a society suspicious of actors and gay men, people might suspect that Philip — unmarried and living by himself as a boarder with a landlady — and his protege might have a less wholesome relationship than the one we’ve seen blossom over the course of the film.

Ultimately, Mr. Burton casts the net too wide for its own good, particularly with an extended climax that is technically still about the relationship between Phillip and Richard but makes the mistake of putting too much emphasis on Richard when Phillip is the real star. As a society, we tend to think the worst of stage mothers, for good reason, as more recent lurid examples can attest. Phillip Burton is an unusual father figure from this vantage point. He spends most of the film resisting the idea of being Richard’s stage father. Phillip only finally reluctantly takes on the role once it becomes clear that the scope of Richard’s talent and ambition far exceeds what he could ever hope to achieve in Wales. To that end, Richard needs direct assistance from a man who cares enough about Richard to at least claim to be his father on a legal document, and bribe the actual father if necessary to get that accomplished.

This fatherly contrast, between Dic who sold his own son for £50, Elfed who cares about Richard but still sees him as a burden, and Philip, who’s frightened of seeming too close to Richard because he’s concerned about their relationship being interpreted as a predatory, is when Mr. Burton is at its strongest.

The film is at its most memorable when it holds up a sentimental contrast between the meaning of fatherhood 80 years ago and today. Ultimately, we don’t really care whether Richard Burton succeeds as an actor. We care about whether he loves and appreciates everything Philip has done for him. Philip, the man who would help create Richard Burton not for his own dreams as an aging thespian, but because he knows it’s what Richard wanted even in his darkest moments.