{"id":138612,"date":"2025-09-07T04:30:08","date_gmt":"2025-09-07T04:30:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/138612\/"},"modified":"2025-09-07T04:30:08","modified_gmt":"2025-09-07T04:30:08","slug":"brendan-fraser-shines-in-family-drama","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/138612\/","title":{"rendered":"Brendan Fraser Shines in Family Drama"},"content":{"rendered":"

Recently someone asked me what movie I was about to review, which as you can imagine happens a lot. I told them, \u201cIt\u2019s this new Brendan Fraser movie called \u2018Rental Family.\u2019\u201d That\u2019s 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 \u201cFurry Vengeance\u201d \u2014 the one where forest critters splash water on his pants so he looks like he\u2019s peed himself.<\/p>\n

Trust me, the situation is nowhere near that dire. \u201cRental Family\u201d 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\u2019s easy to see what attracted Fraser to this material, since it\u2019s almost mechanically designed to make him look good as an actor, and enchanting as a star.<\/p>\n

\u201cRental Family\u201d 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\u2019t terribly successful, but there are a lot of roles for token white guys and he doesn\u2019t need a day job to supplement his income, so he can\u2019t be doing very badly either.<\/p>\n

One day Phillip gets hired for a mysterious new gig. He shows up and realizes he\u2019s an extra in somebody\u2019s 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\u2019s absentee father at parent-teacher meetings. And just like Phillip\u2019s other acting gigs, there\u2019s usually a role for another token white guy.<\/p>\n

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Rental family services aren\u2019t common in America, and in a lesser movie they could be the source of cheap and judgmental comedy. So director Hikari (\u201c37 Seconds\u201d) and co-writer Stephen Blahut try to get Phillip\u2019s culture shock out of the way quickly. In Phillip\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Afterwards, Phillip\u2019s co-worker gives him a stern talking to about his judgmental western attitude, taking him \u2014 and by extension, American audiences \u2014 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\u2019ll 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\u2019t forgotten him.<\/p>\n

In short, \u201cRental Family\u201d 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 \u201cRental Family\u201d get off their stage and walk directly into their client\u2019s lives, providing a more immersive experience. It\u2019s a love letter to humane performances, the type of roles Brendan Fraser always excels at. This is no exception.<\/p>\n

Hikari\u2019s film doesn\u2019t entirely shy away from the moral grey areas of rental family services. Phillip\u2019s co-worker, played by Mari Yamamoto (\u201cMonarch: Legacy of Monsters\u201d), is often cast as the other woman in extramarital affairs, and takes all of the blame for a cheating husband\u2019s betrayal. It\u2019s humiliating and often abusive, and \u201cRental Family\u201d considers it the dark side of this phenomenon. In these instances the job isn\u2019t about contributing to people\u2019s lives, it\u2019s about aiding and abetting these manipulative men and their misogyny.<\/p>\n

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It\u2019s all very interesting, even though it\u2019s tonally chaotic. \u201cRental Family\u201d 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\u2019t always work wonders for the audience. It\u2019s easy to struggle with how exactly we\u2019re supposed to feel about all this.<\/p>\n

But again, it\u2019s not about how we \u201cfeel\u201d about rental families, it\u2019s about how well we understand them. After watching this film I understand rental families better, but I still don\u2019t understand the practice well enough to judge, and that also means I don\u2019t understand rental families well enough to determine if \u201cRental Family\u201d does any justice to this topic. All I can say for certain is that Hikari\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n

\u201cRental Family\u201d opens in theaters on Nov. 21.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Recently someone asked me what movie I was about to review, which as you can imagine happens a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":138613,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[45895,88,56150,86562,206,45896,46686,84120],"class_list":{"0":"post-138612","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-brendan-fraser","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-hikari","11":"tag-mari-yamamoto","12":"tag-movies","13":"tag-rental-family","14":"tag-tiff","15":"tag-tiff-2025"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138612","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=138612"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138612\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/138613"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=138612"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=138612"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=138612"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}