Richard Burton’s legacy is one of contradictions. He is both a towering figure of 20th-century popular culture and a bright, brief candle whose peers made indelible marks on the 21st, too. He managed to achieve success as both a classical stage actor and marquee-name movie star at a time when slippage between those worlds was at a minimum. He was nominated for an Oscar seven times, but never won. His relationship with Elizabeth Taylor—with whom he co-starred in many films and stage productions, most famously Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?—is remembered as an epic love story despite their twice divorcing. He described himself as a socialist, or indeed a communist, but moved to Switzerland to avoid paying taxes, wryly commenting, “I believe that everyone should pay them—except actors.” Famously an alcoholic, he claimed to drink to stave off the deadness of being offstage. Sometimes his alcoholism was functional; other times he was reportedly so drunk, like while filming The Klansman (1974), that he had to shoot all his scenes sitting or lying down. By his forties, he had become frail and weak. By 58, he was dead.

Mr. Burton is not about any of this. 

Based on the early life of actor Richard Burton and released earlier this year to little notice, the biopic Mr. Burton is a bit like a pointillist painting. At a distance, it makes one picture, but up close, the dots of color disaggregate, unsettling our assumptions about the whole. 

Mr. Burton’s shape initially seems recognizable and familiar: an origin story biopic, this time about Richard Burton, in the key of gentle inspirational drama about a boy’s life transforming thanks to the guiding hand of a mentor—P.H. Burton, the English teacher whose surname Richard would take.  It’s a life-affirming tale of success against the odds, yet fated to be. The film works on that level, and in some ways guides us to watch it like that. The tender tone is set by an opening quote from Burton’s twice-wife Elizabeth Taylor: “Without Philip Burton there never would have been a Richard Burton. That great rolling voice that cracked like wild Atlantic waves would never have been heard outside the valley.” 

But on closer inspection, Mr. Burton is replete with knots of tension just beneath its smooth, soft surface. It carries inside its heart an anxious hesitancy regarding class, sexuality, and national identity, and about the very relationship it chronicles. 

It’s a film that dug its claws into me, despite having the outward appearance of being thoroughly clawless. 

The film opens in 1942, when the future Richard Burton is still Richie Jenkins, played by relatively unknown English actor Harry Lawtey—in what would be a star-making performance if anybody was paying attention. Richie is a 17-year-old schoolboy in a small mining town in Wales, and his future prospects include getting shipped to the front in a year, perhaps to be killed, and/or spending the next few decades coughing up coal dust. His mother is long dead, his father is a hopeless drunk, and he lives with his doting sister, her husband, and their children, perpetually struggling to make ends meet. 

Lawtey never plays Richie as an innate talent simply waiting to be discovered. Though ethereally beautiful in a certain light, he is unexceptional in most every respect. When asked to memorize the prologue to Henry V in his high school English class, you half-expect him to suddenly become Richard Burton, acclaimed Shakespearean actor in one fell swoop. Instead, he rattles it off at speed and a little out of breath, the only emotion in his voice the slight joy of getting it right. Lawtey—over six foot tall to Burton’s maybe-five-ten—habitually hunches and slouches, as if he hasn’t yet learned how to exist inside his body, unsure how to take up that much space. He mumbles and gawks and never seems wise, or anything else, beyond his years. When Richie’s brother-in-law demands he drop out of school and contribute financially to the household, securing him a job in the haberdashery section of a local department store, it seems no grander a tragedy than that of your average high school dropout. 

The 17-year-old’s English teacher—the titular Mr. Burton, played by consummate character actor Toby Jones—sees it differently. He recognizes a glimpse of greatness in Richie, something which the audience only knows because we know the future. It’s not clear how Burton sees it: what Richie is, or the vast potential of what Richie can be. Maybe he merely wanted to see something in Richie and took one hell of a lucky guess. P.H. Burton is a devoted theatre lover, who despite his former career as a marginal figure in the West End scene, is now little more than a failed actor and playwright whose only successful creative outlet is occasional radio plays on regional BBC broadcasts. What he sees in Richie doesn’t seem to be based on much more than his enjoyment of the class-assigned Shakespeare reading. But on evidence that slim, the teacher turns both of their lives upside-down. 

P.H. Burton starts a local dramatics society—he invites Richie to participate, and, indeed, may have only formed the society in order to do so. He gives Richie major parts in their productions, of course, and encourages him to return to education, eventually speaking to the school board on his behalf to have him reinstated. When Richie expresses his desire to be an actor, P.H. devotes his time to personal one-on-one lessons. Richie is, it’s important to note, not even good at acting: he is, initially, only slightly better than the other kids in the drama group who can barely learn their lines or, like, convey an emotion. P.H. admittedly tells Richie he has little to no hope of becoming a professional actor, but works doggedly with him all the same. He has a nice face, P.H.’s landlady Ma Smith (Lesley Manville) decides, and a voice you can work on. 

After a while, Richie moves in, with P.H. renting the room next to his at Ma’s place: though ostensibly a boarding house, it is in truth a shared home, with P.H. having lived there full-time for a decade and no other lodgers ever seen or mentioned. Richie’s sister hopes with heartbreaking earnestness that P.H. will allow her brother an opportunity for a better kind of life, and her husband is happy to have one less mouth to feed. Eventually, P.H. proposes adopting Richie—a formality, he says, to avoid awkward questions about his living arrangements when he applies for a scholarship to Oxford, using P.H.’s connections. 

On one hand, it’s a story of profound generosity. But generosity that profound is hard to accept at face value, prompting you to wonder if it’s generosity at all. In The Blind Side, a superficially similar story of a poor kid (future NFL player Michael Oher) adopted by kindly benefactors (Leigh Anne and Sean Tuohy), the world Oher came from is depicted as worse in every conceivable way, with the merest possibility of the Tuohys being self-interested only raised briefly just so the film can preemptively dismiss it, framing this concern as the domain of nefarious actors who want manipulate Oher. (In reality, the Tuohys put Oher in a conservatorship and made hundreds of thousands off his back.) The Blind Side encourages the viewer to reject their own nagging doubts; Mr. Burton makes the viewer live with the juxtaposition of conflicting ways to understand the story it’s telling. “Nobody to my knowledge, by the way, has quite gotten to the bottom of Burton’s relationship with his teacher and mentor at Port Talbot Secondary School, congenital bachelor Philip Burton,” Roger Lewis writes in his 2023 biography Erotic Vagrancy: Everything About Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. While Mr. Burton plays fast and loose with some of the facts, it functions as a meditation on the nature of this thing between them: making us sit with the ambiguity, at least for a while. 

A large part of the film sees P.H. acting as the real-life Henry Higgins opposite Richie’s Eliza Doolittle. If Lawtey’s performance begins as a gangly, awkward teenager, by the end—his broad shoulders held back, a tuxedo hugging his frame—I was convinced that he would be an excellent James Bond. He gives a subtle physical performance that parallels the more obvious transformation in how he speaks. As an actor, the Richard Burton we know spoke with an BBC-newsreader English accent, but this was an affectation, as he grew up in a poor, working-class, Welsh-speaking home. In P.H.’s acting lessons, Richie learning to project his voice or control his breath are part of the same lessons as, simply put, Anglicising his speech. Though Americans tend to think of Britain as a single coherent entity, the Celtic fringe nations of the U.K.—Scotland, Wales, the Isle of Man and, depending on the time period, Ireland or Northern Ireland—occupy a fraught and fluctuating status as simultaneous colonized and colonizer. They participate in and benefit from an overseas British imperialism that is dominated internally by the imperial core of England, whose language, culture and traditions are treated as the British default. Wales has mostly had less of a nationalist streak than Scotland or Ireland, but Mr. Burton emphatically portrays Richie as Welsh first and foremost. His first language is Welsh, the speaking of which once saw children at school marked out with a “Welsh Not” token put around their neck at school, and often beaten. His English is the product of millennia of Welsh history, from the length of his vowel sounds to his melodic intonation. 

But being an actor is inextricable from removing markers of his class and nationality from his voice. An actor must speak “properly,” which means sounding upper-class and English. Richie’s brother-in-law tells him that changing his voice is an insult to his family, his people, where he comes from. “Don’t tell me where I come from,” Richie snaps in Welsh, which his brother-in-law can’t speak. They each have a point: changing his accent cuts both ways. P.H. is giving this working-class Welsh boy the tools to succeed, but those tools erase the outward signs of who he is. Burton’s generation of British and Irish actors was full of working-class people from out-of-the-way places who spoke in accents not their own—Burton’s fellow hellraisers Peter O’Toole and Richard Harris, for two. All these decades later, the range of accents that are accepted in public life may have increased, but there is a dearth of actors and musicians from working-class backgrounds, as the evisceration of youth services and public arts funding has made creative professions the domain of the mega-posh. As I watch Richie learn to speak “properly,” I am at once saddened by the overt discrimination that would make such a thing necessary and wistful for a time when class barriers to the stage and screen were that superficial and surmountable. It is, like so much in Mr. Burton, a double-edged sword. 

P.H.’s taking a particular interest in Richie prompts rumor and speculation, especially once they begin living together. People who Richie doesn’t even know whisper when they see him:“Moved in with that teacher. You can guess what he’s after.” There’s nothing in those murmurs resembling true concern for Richie as a potential victim, just homophobic bile targeting both of them at once. But the whispers are so constant that you can’t ignore them. Richie’s girlfriend questions why he isn’t more handsy, and when he replies that he’s a gentleman, she clarifies: “You do want to, though, don’t you?” 

“Of course I bloody want to,” Richie tells her, “Why on earth would you think I don’t?” She bats the question away—“I dunno, it’s nothing”—but the answer is obvious. As they speak, he’s wearing P.H.’s socks. 

You want to dismiss it out of hand: outsiders misunderstanding a relationship that we get to see the inside of. Yet there is this frisson of erotic tension—or a tension that appears erotic, maybe—between them. When P.H. first proposes Richie moving in with him, he’s delicately removing the false beard Richie wore as Higgins in Pygmalion—in case you hadn’t gotten it—their faces close together, speaking in hushed tones, and when Richie’s girlfriend approaches, she backs away as P.H. glances up at her. When the student and teacher live together, neither seem perturbed by Richie leaving his bedroom door open while wearing just a towel slung around his hips. In another scene, Richie and P.H. sit in dim light next to each other on P.H.’s bed, both in pajamas, while Richie tells P.H. how grateful he is to him. Even describing these moments feels like calling too much attention to them: the film’s approach is feather-light, just putting you ever so slightly off-balance. There is an intimacy between them that your brain rushes to categorize, mostly unsuccessfully. 

The adoption seems like the promise of a happy ending. But all those whispers are still ringing in Richie’s ears—his biological father echoes those rumors when he signs the papers, calling Richie a homophobic slur—and so Richie goes to get blind drunk, his head full of things better left unsaid, then he stumbles home and blurts them all out. “Good old P.H., eh? You clothed me, you fed me, all out of the goodness of his heart,” he says, detached, before rising to his feet and shouting, “It’s the worst kept secret in fucking Port Talbot! Do you think I don’t know what it is that you want?” P.H.’s response is an odd non-denial. He doesn’t address what Richie is accusing him of, not really, even if it feels like the natural upshot of his pleas that he’s done so much for Richie, to help him. They don’t hash it out: Richie runs away. Sleeps with his girlfriend like he’s trying to prove something. Goes to auditions, goes to Oxford. He’s Richard Burton now, a more forceful reminder of the past than his father’s name would have been. 

The film invents an eight-year estrangement that, while fictional, mimics something of the real Richard Burton’s complicated feelings about his namesake, his sexuality, and his masculinity. (“Most actors are latent homosexuals and we cover it with drink,” Burton said in 1975, “I was a homosexual once but not for long. But I tried it. It didn’t work, so I gave it up.”) All this time has passed, and Richard is about to open as Hal in Henry IV Part 1 and Part 2 in Stratford-upon-Avon: habitually drunk, voice finished transforming, somehow still subject to casual anti-Welsh jibes, and still not off-book days before the premiere. When he’s too sloshed to be able to remember the morning after, he calls home. Asks P.H. to come. It would be easy for the film to play their reunion as a soppy epilogue. But that tension and ambiguity remain. The interpolation of Henry IV prompts us to wonder if Richard turns his back on his weird old man, like Hal did to Falstaff. Somebody refers to P.H. as Richard’s acting coach, and he says, “he’s not my acting coach,” but he doesn’t fill in the blank with another title. 

After spending so much of its runtime wondering what exactly it is that Richie and P.H. are to each other, it is only in the film’s final moments that Mr. Burton offers an answer, the story’s disparate dots cohering into an overarching image. P.H. compliments Richard’s performance, struggling to articulate how moved he was, when Richie pulls him into his arms. “Can a man not hug his own bloody father?” he says. Ah, yes. That is the word, isn’t it?