Mr Blake at Your Service (2023) is charming and playing around the country

 

John Malkovich and the cat

This is one of the great finds of 2025, Just as I was losing mydesire to watch movies, this joy came along and surprised and delighted me.

The plot has John Malkovich playing a successful business man mourning the loss of his wife. Looking to find a connection to the world he takes a job as a butler at the French manner house where he first met his wife decades before.   All is not wellin the house. The woman who owns the place is in financial trouble and and she too is mourning the loss of her husband. She wants a butler because she is planning on opening the house as a vacation rental.

I am not going to lie and say the plot does anything unexpected, it really doesn't. But what it does do is give us a great collection of characters we can fall in love with. Everyone is charming and the sort of person we want to hang out with. We like them and we like their little quirks.

Which brings me to Malkovich, I've never seen him play a straightman before. Seriously he plays essentially a regular guy and lets the others be the quirky ones. It's an eye opening experience because you realize just how good he is. Yes, we have had decades of great Malkovich roles, but at the same time watching this you realize what we could have had if he was just allowed to be a regular person on screen and not someone with an odd quirk. I suspect that he took the role because he was acting in French, which he is not supposed to be perfectly fluent in (there are jokes about him being English and not getting words right), but I still would have loved to have seen him do this other times.

What a delight. Once I gave myself over to it and realized the plot line wasn't going to be surprising I fell into the film and into the company on screen. I became one of them and by the end the turns had me getting misty.

I absolutely loved this film.

High art? Probably not, but this is better. This is the sort of film you'll watch repeatedly because you just love the place it puts you in. Honestly if this were in English this film would become a cable/streaming staple and in five years it would be considered a classic.

Highly recommended.