Recently someone asked me what movie I was about to review, which as you can imagine happens a lot. I told them, “It’s this new Brendan Fraser movie called ‘Rental Family.’” That’s when the phone went quiet. Chillingly quiet. After a moment they said they felt bad for Brendan Fraser, because he just won an Oscar and it sounds like he was already starring in another banal family comedy like “Furry Vengeance” — the one where forest critters splash water on his pants so he looks like he’s peed himself.
Trust me, the situation is nowhere near that dire. “Rental Family” may sound like a generic PG-rated family flick but the Searchlight Pictures film is actually a tender, modest drama that just happens to have a premise right out of a PG-rated family flick. It’s easy to see what attracted Fraser to this material, since it’s almost mechanically designed to make him look good as an actor, and enchanting as a star.
“Rental Family” stars Fraser as Phillip Vandarploeug, an American actor living in Japan, whose agent has apparently never once suggested he change his last name. Phillip isn’t terribly successful, but there are a lot of roles for token white guys and he doesn’t need a day job to supplement his income, so he can’t be doing very badly either.
One day Phillip gets hired for a mysterious new gig. He shows up and realizes he’s an extra in somebody’s funeral. Except nobody is filming it. Phillip has wandered into the very real world of rental family services, where people hire actors to fill otherwise empty roles in their lives. They need people to pad out the guest list at parties, or pretend to be friends and lovers, or stand-in for someone’s absentee father at parent-teacher meetings. And just like Phillip’s other acting gigs, there’s usually a role for another token white guy.
Rental family services aren’t common in America, and in a lesser movie they could be the source of cheap and judgmental comedy. So director Hikari (“37 Seconds”) and co-writer Stephen Blahut try to get Phillip’s culture shock out of the way quickly. In Phillip’s first big gig he has to pretend to get married to a young Japanese woman, fooling her family in the process, and Phillip finds that morally dicey. So much so that he almost backs out at the last second. This particular vignette concludes in the most heroic way possible, portraying rental family services in an exceptionally positive light.
Afterwards, Phillip’s co-worker gives him a stern talking to about his judgmental western attitude, taking him — and by extension, American audiences — to task for not even trying to understand the culture in which they are currently immersed. Phillip, who loves Japan and makes his home there, realizes he was wrong and embraces this new role. He becomes a fictional father to a little girl who temporarily needs one, even though he’ll eventually have to abandon her and break her heart. He also impersonates a film critic and conducts a series of interviews with an aging star, just to make the man feel like audiences haven’t forgotten him.
In short, “Rental Family” is about why we rely on actors. Movies and plays fill voids in our lives, giving us romance when we have none, and catharsis when fate fails to come through. The actors in “Rental Family” get off their stage and walk directly into their client’s lives, providing a more immersive experience. It’s a love letter to humane performances, the type of roles Brendan Fraser always excels at. This is no exception.
Hikari’s film doesn’t entirely shy away from the moral grey areas of rental family services. Phillip’s co-worker, played by Mari Yamamoto (“Monarch: Legacy of Monsters”), is often cast as the other woman in extramarital affairs, and takes all of the blame for a cheating husband’s betrayal. It’s humiliating and often abusive, and “Rental Family” considers it the dark side of this phenomenon. In these instances the job isn’t about contributing to people’s lives, it’s about aiding and abetting these manipulative men and their misogyny.
It’s all very interesting, even though it’s tonally chaotic. “Rental Family” is, in turns, wholesome and vicious, funny and severe, contrived and elegant. It is after all a film about actors with oodles of range, undergoing the unique challenges of their craft, and these shifts serve the material well but they don’t always work wonders for the audience. It’s easy to struggle with how exactly we’re supposed to feel about all this.
But again, it’s not about how we “feel” about rental families, it’s about how well we understand them. After watching this film I understand rental families better, but I still don’t understand the practice well enough to judge, and that also means I don’t understand rental families well enough to determine if “Rental Family” does any justice to this topic. All I can say for certain is that Hikari’s film is a complex conversation about the craft of acting, but often gets sidelined in its own contrivances and emotional manipulations, calling attention to the artifice of, admittedly, a story about artifice.
“Rental Family” opens in theaters on Nov. 21.