There’s a particular type of movie I’ve always had a soft spot for. I like to call them my elderly British comfort movies. They usually involve an older English person who putters their way into the lives of younger characters and changes them in humorous and meaningful ways – think “Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris.”
“Mr. Blake at Your Service!,” directed by the French author Gilles Legardinier and based on his own 2012 novel, falls snugly into this category – although Legardinier’s sensibilities aren’t quite as gentle as the rest of the genre, making for a rather strange film.
“Mr. Blake at Your Service!” is fun enough, with hijinks and odd couple relationships abounding. But the movie is far too long for its own good, and often skips over important context about relationships in favor of strange, would-be comedic moments that don’t gel with the rest of the film’s tone.
Having recently become a widower, Andrew Blake (John Malkovich), a wealthy British businessman, decides to visit the French manor house where he first met his wife. The house is owned by Nathalie (Fanny Ardant), a woman who has also just lost her spouse and is struggling to keep the manor afloat. After a case of mistaken identity, Andrew ends up working as the manor’s new butler and helps forge and mend the relationships between all the other members of the household.
At its heart, “Mr. Blake at Your Service!” is about found family. The staff of the manor house is comprised of a group of loners with ample amounts of baggage – whether they be prickly, or gruff, or shy, they’re all just a little bit strange. Andrew is here to show them that they can be strange together, trying to recreate the magical connection he made with his late wife here amongst everyone else.
Andrew and Nathalie, the lady of the house, have the most in common – they’re of a similar age, they both recently lost a spouse – but their chemistry fails in comparison to Andrew’s connection with Odile (the late Émilie Dequenne) the manor’s stern, no-nonsense chef who Andrew takes on as a sort of pet project. The best moments in “Mr. Blake at Your Service!” are the shared ones between Odile and Andrew, defined by a lovely, humorous tension between his mischievousness and her inability to not be charmed by him. Dequenne’s performance is quietly the best in the film – up against Malkovich’s much sillier approach, she’s able to subtly strip away her character’s walls almost without you realizing what she’s doing.
When “Mr. Blake” is being silly without any real consequence, it’s a perfectly lovely entry into this particular film canon. Andrew spends much of the movie scheming to help Philippe (Philippe Bas), the brutish, hapless groundskeeper, learn how to impress the more buttoned-up Odile, including a charming sequence where Philippe and Andrew go on a fake date. There’s a very cute, smushed-face cat named Mephisto. One of Philippe’s pet projects is building tiny houses for the hedgehogs that live on the grounds. All of these unique, cute little quirks are exactly what you want from a movie like this.
But cute can only sustain interest for so long, and as “Mr. Blake at Your Service!” goes on, and the consequences – the fact that Nathalie might lose the manor – become a little more serious, the movie can’t quite keep its tone straight. Sequences that are meant to be harrowing come across as jokes and vice versa, and the emotion of the film’s ending depends on the strength of a relationship that the movie spends little to no time developing. As silly as it can be, “Mr. Blake at Your Service!” can’t deliver on much else.