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‘Mr. Burton’ Review: Harry Lawtey Plays the Pride of Wales, and Toby Jones the Man Who Made Him, in a Gentle Showbiz Origin Story
Harry Lawtey plays the young Richard Burton, and Toby Jones his mentor, in Marc Evans' sentimentalized but enjoyable biopic 'Mr. Burton.'
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. 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. As played by Toby Jones with his customary retiring restraint, Philip is unexpectedly the central figure of Tom Bullough and Josh Hyams’ literate, comfortingly old-fashioned script, which lightly simplifies and romanticizes certain details of a Hollywood life story that was already movie-ready in its extreme rags-to-riches arc.
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