Mr. Blake at Your Service!
John Malkovich in a frothy, heartwarming comedy about an accidental butler may seem like an incongruous bit of casting. But this French treat is an entertaining ode to accepting life as it comes.
I’ll confess when I learned the description for “Mr. Blake at Your Service!” and saw John Malkovich at the head of the cast, my first thought was the weird coincidence of there being another actor with the same name as the guy famous for his portrayal of icky, malevolent, often outright murderous characters.
But no, it’s that John Malkovich. In a frothy comedy about a wealthy businessman who accidentally enlists to be the butler at a dilapidated country estate. With many heartwarming, life-affirming moments ensuing.
In French, to boot.
Malkovich plays Andrew Blake, a British business tycoon devastated by the recent death of his French wife. He resolves to stay at the same estate in France where they first met to process his grief, but it has fallen into a sorry state and he is mistaken as an applicant for the butler position. At first very put out, he resolves to play along with the scenario and finds himself bonding with the small motley band of employees and their enigmatic mistress.
While it may seem like an especially incongruous bit of casting for Malkovich, it just works. It’s an entertaining treat that also serves as an ode to accepting life as it comes.
It’s based on a 2012 novel by Gilles Legardinier, who co-wrote the screenplay adaptation with Christel Henon. Legardinier even stepped behind the camera to direct, his first foray into filmmaking.
Interestingly, the film was released in France in 2023 under the title “Complètement cramé!”, same as the book, translating as “Completely Burnt Out!”. It was retitled “Well Done!” in other countries and “At Your Service, Madam” in Poland, and is finally arriving on these shores as “Mr. Blake at Your Service!”.
(You’ll please note the correct usage of having the sentence punctuation outside of the quotation marks, something only done when the title being quoted itself contains punctuation. This is what tens of thousands of dollars in student loans for a master’s degree in journalism buys you, folks.)
The story opens with Blake ditching a major celebration of his business accomplishments. As he says to his oldest, only friend (Al Ginter), the life has gone out of his life since his beloved Diane passed away fourth months earlier. He’s also somewhat estranged from his adult daughter, now living in Australia.
Lacking any other idea of what to do and at a traditional retirement age, he resolves to stay at the same charming bed-and-breakfast where he and his wife met 40 years ago to sort things out. Alas, the Beauvillier Estate — almost a castle, really — has fallen on hard times and is not ready to rent out guest rooms again.
The owner, Nathalie Beauvillier (played by French cinema icon Fanny Ardant, still a stunning beauty at 76), lost her own husband some years ago and has been suffering through a long dark mood. She wants to reopen to guests, but the place needs repairs and a staff to run it, otherwise she is in danger of losing it altogether.
The headstrong cook, Odile (Émilie Dequenne), assumes the courteous Blake is an applicant for the butler position, and sticks him in a tiny servant’s quarters — with no hot water or dinner, which he finds a calamitous deterioration of the hotel’s accommodations. Soon enough they sort out the mess, but Blake agrees to stay on as butler for a trial period until the Beauvillier is ready to open again.
The first night, he’s nearly shot by Magnier (Philippe Bas), the good-hearted but uncouth groundskeeper/handyman. He lives in a shack in the woods, a self-described grouchy hermit, though he is secretly smitten with Odile. She accepts his daily gifts of wild mushrooms and onions for her kitchen, but resists his (admittedly modest) charms.
There’s also Manon (Eugénie Anselin), the young cleaning girl, who turns out has some serious life challenges that Blake resolves to help with.
The primary relationship is between Blake and Odile, a typical sort of thing where natural antagonists gradually forge a strong friendship. They’re both people who have carefully built a wall of protection around themselves, and it’s enjoyable to watch them slowly take down their barrier, brick by brick.
At first seen only at a distance, Nathalie becomes more important in the second half of the movie as she allows this curious stranger to infiltrate her own shell. At first I thought the most obvious thing from a storytelling perspective would happen: two similarly-aged people, both consumed with depression at a lost spouse, come together for an autumn romance.
But the film has other ambitions…
There’s really nothing terribly novel about “Mr. Blake at Your Service!”, other than the surprise of seeing Malkovich in such a role — and being quite good at it. He plays Blake as a smart, somewhat peevish man who is just coming to grasp with the idea that his life, if it is going to continue, will have to be very different from the one he’s led.
Other actors have enjoyed late-in-career hard shifts into different material — Liam Neeson as a geriatric action star comes to mind. I’m not sure if we’ll see John Malkovich transform into a cuddly grandpa figure, but it’s a testament to the man’s talents that he makes us see the possibility.
“Mr. Blake at Your Service” is available for rental on all the major streaming services June 20.