Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.The biopic Mr Burton is partly about a king, but more about a kingmaker. The title really refers to Philip Burton, who mentored a promising young actor and helped him become something more than he could have imagined — the stage and screen legend Richard Burton.Philip, played by Toby Jones, was the schoolteacher in Port Talbot, Wales, who caught a glimmer of the nascent talent in miner’s son Richard Jenkins; he encouraged him, passed on his own passion for the stage, made him his ward and, as the film tells it, struggled not to be cast aside. The script, by Josh Hyams and Tom Bullough, makes knowing play on Pygmalion and Henry IV Part II: Philip is Henry Higgins, rejected Falstaff and a little bit Dr Frankenstein too.Burton-to-be is played by Harry Lawtey. He has a definite look of the real thing in his youth, and convincingly exudes the simmering anguish, but overemphasises the unvarnished teenage gawkiness, his open-mouthed pout distractingly close to Ben Stiller’s “Blue Steel” expression in Zoolander. What’s interesting is the way his Richie gradually changes, polishing himself and learning to let rip until he becomes the bold but erratic Burton of the final scenes.Philip here is a punctilious, rather stuffy aesthete who declares, “A cultured person is never lonely” — something his whole demeanour belies. Jones plays with sharp ambivalence on the desire — and the desire to dominate — that motivates any Svengali, however honourable. He quietly evokes the umbrage of a man misunderstood (or understood too well), who knows that his creation will both surpass him and slip way beyond his control. This is an admiring, even somewhat pious portrait, far from the cruel but nevertheless plausible depiction of Philip in Roger Lewis’s Burton-Taylor biography Erotic Vagrancy, neurotically riding his protégé’s coattails.The film plays too cautiously on Richard’s anxieties — the guilt about abandoning his roots, about changing both his name and his self. But the sexuality issues are stated all too bluntly: Richie’s barroom blowhard dad (Steffan Rhodri) sneers, “They said you’d turned into a poofter.”There is intelligent insight here, with an ear for the period’s pained discretion: having the boy move in with him, Philip is warned, will “inevitably lead to speculation”. But overall, Marc Evans’s film feels cautious — not least in its glumly taupe visuals. It avoids overstating the grimness and griminess of its 1940s milieu, but the result is a little too tidy, with CGI vistas resembling a nice print on a B&B wall.Lesley Manville plays Philip’s supportive, empathetic landlady, a part best summed up by her line, “Let me make you some tea” — all in all, not a role worthy of Manville’s fearsome calibre, although she carries it off impeccably. As for Jones, he is characteristically fine as a man inclined to disappear into himself and his doubts. He can signify more with a gently furrowed brow than most performers can at full fury — which very nearly makes this mostly bland film into an implicit essay on contrasting acting styles.★★☆☆☆In cinemas from April 4
