‘Mr. Burton’ Review: Harry Lawtey Plays the Pride of Wales, and Toby Jones the Man Who Made Him, in a Gentle Showbiz Origin Story

variety.com:

Guy Lodge Film Critic Richard Burton never got around to writing an official set of memoirs before his untimely, alcohol-hastened death in 1984, though the star’s posthumously published diaries are among the great volumes of their kind in the showbiz library: sometimes brutally candid about himself, often savagely catty about others, and reflective of a wry, wicked mind behind the boorish antics that kept him in the headlines.

There’s little of that wit or mischief to be found in Marc Evans‘ quiet, earnestly soft-hearted biopic “Mr. Burton,” though that discrepancy is at least partly the point.

Dramatizing the Welshman’s formative early years as an actor, from his rough working-class adolescence to the brink of celebrity in his mid-twenties, Evans’ film intends to show us an unformed boy scarcely recognizable as the imposing, burgundy-voiced lead of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” and “Look Back in Anger,” right down to his unfamiliar childhood name: Richie Jenkins.

Indeed, for at least most of the film’s running time, the eponymous Mr. Burton is not Richard but Philip: a kindly, unassuming schoolmaster in a small Welsh mining town, with a passion for theater that rubs off on a certain naive, bright-eyed 17-year-old boy in his English class.