The Valet (2022)

The Valet arrives as a remake of a 2006 French comedy, the sort of provenance that usually signals a lazy afternoon on a streaming service. Richard Wong's version transplants the premise to Los Angeles and hands the title role to Eugenio Derbez, and in doing so it performs a quiet act of demographic re-engineering. The valet is now Antonio Flores, an immigrant father sharing custody of a teenage son, and the community around him is Latino, bilingual, and under siege from developers. The film casts its world accordingly, filling the margins with relatives, coworkers, and a Korean landlord named Mr. Kim who courts Antonio's mother without a shared language. This is representation as architecture, not ornament, and it holds the picture together.

The social consciousness on display is real but restrained. Gentrification drives the plot, a billionaire's scheme to raze the neighborhood, and the film takes visible pleasure in the humiliation of service workers by the wealthy. Antonio stands up for his occupation at a premiere. Kathryn, the billionaire's wife, takes over the company and cancels the demolition, which is the sort of resolution that flatters an audience while leaving the actual power structure undisturbed. The critique lands, but softly. Olivia ends a controlling affair and Natalie fights for her bike shop, granting the women agency without making a thesis of it.

What the film declines to do is instructive. There is no climate sermon, no body-diversity subplot, no neurodivergent arc, no historical revisionism, despite a film-within-the-film about Amelia Earhart that could easily have been pressed into service. The messaging arrives through character and incident, the least objectionable delivery method available. The result is a romantic comedy that wears its progressive sensibilities lightly, like a good jacket, and mostly wants to make you feel warm. It succeeds. The classification is unremarkable, but it is not empty.