There's schmaltz for sale in Rental Family and business is booming
An American actor in Tokyo forges white-lie connections through a rent-a-family agency in the cloying, smug drama.
Photo: Searchlight Pictures
Brendan Fraser is like a hug in human form in Rental Family, a film determined to provide no small amount of big feelings. In his early stardom, the 56-year-old actor exuded a boisterous, goofy innocence, suggesting the energy of a big kid who somehow was old enough to drink. As Fraser moved into middle age, his face and body filled out, but that delicate, childlike quality held firm. In The Whale, which won him an Oscar and cemented his comeback, he played someone with a good heart who was fundamentally broken, and Fraser made the character’s anguish palpable. As he’s gotten older, he’s tapped into a touching fragility on the other side of that immaturity, seemingly drawn to portraying people for whom life is almost too much to bear. Rental Family is ideally suited to his talents—it’s a pity that it reveals the limitations of his unabashed humanism.
Directed and co-written by Japanese filmmaker Hikari, the tearjerking drama takes place in Tokyo, where American actor Phillip (Fraser) has lived for seven years. He has struggled landing steady gigs, until one day he accidentally stumbles into an event organized by a “rent-a-family” company, one of many in Japan. The company’s owner Shinji (Takehiro Hira) explains the concept: Customers hire his employees to serve as surrogate loved ones for situations like weddings or funerals. It’s a service that fends off loneliness in a Japanese culture in which people are leery of talking about their problems to a therapist. Phillip is bewildered and intrigued, and the money is good, so he comes on board. It’s just another form of acting, right?
After running through several of Phillip’s early adventures in the job, Rental Family focuses on two clients. In one assignment, he poses as the long-lost father of a girl named Mia (Shannon Mahina Gorman), whose single mother (Shino Shinozaki) needs Phillip to pretend to be her husband so that Mia can get into an elite private school. Soon, though, Mia becomes attached to Phillip, eagerly believing her mother’s lie that he is her father. Phillip’s other major client is Kikuo (Akira Emoto), an aging actor who fears that he has been forgotten—Phillip has been hired by Kikuo’s daughter to pose as a journalist writing a story about his illustrious career. Inevitably, Phillip bonds with Kikuo, affected by the older man’s wise perspective on life, just as Alzheimer’s seems to be taking hold.
Previous films have similarly wrestled with our need for connection—and the sometimes surreal lengths we’ll go to maintain those relationships. Marjorie Prime imagined a future in which a computer program can replicate the dearly departed. Yorgos Lanthimos’ Alps took a dark look at a foursome who offers to stand in for dead family members so that the grieving can process the loss through role-playing. Tender and sentimental, Rental Family possesses none of those earlier films’ sting, shying away from the subject matter’s potentially fascinating psychological depths. Hikari wants to reassure her audience, not leave them troubled. Fraser is all too willing to oblige.
