Stream It or Skip It?

Rental Family (now streaming on VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video) is rooted in one of the more puzzling components of Japanese culture: agencies that rent out actors to fill roles in people’s real lives. Those “roles” range from being a wedding guest to fill out the ranks of attendees in order to maintain appearances, or being the actual groom in the wedding. You’ll see the latter scenario in the film, which stars Brendan Fraser as a lonely American man struggling to find work as an actor in Tokyo. The film is directed and co-written, with Stephen Blahut, by Hikari (37 Seconds, TV series Beef), who deserves praise for perpetuating the FRASENAISSANCE, even though the movie doesn’t plumb the depths of its thematic implications. 

The Gist: The scene: bustling Tokyo. Phillip VanderPloeg (Fraser) hustles to an audition, and just barely arrives on time. How’d it go? Well, read the expression on Phillip’s face after the movie cuts to him looking utterly miserable while wearing a big foam tree costume. He’s been doing this for years now, and the highlight in his resume reel is playing a giant rubber tooth in a toothpaste commercial. Whether this is humiliating or sad or funny or all of the above is debatable (it’s most likely all of the above), but either way, he tends to cope by grabbing a couple drinks after work then going home to his tiny, cluttered shoebox apartment and longingly watching people in the high-rise across the street interact with their families. Notably, Phillip is a large man navigating a dense, cramped city. We see him squeeze into a seat on the bus and duck awkwardly under doorways. He’s like Baby Huey in Smurf Village. Why is he here? Why does he stay? We’re not sure. Let’s move on.

One morning Phillip gets a call from his agent. “What’s my role?” he asks. “Sad American,” is the reply. I think we’ve established he can play that one pretty easily. He hustles to the gig and walks into a funeral service, where he’ll play a grieving guest. It turns out the cadaver is not a cadaver and is very much alive, leaving us scratching our heads like Phillip; maybe it’s not that illogical to have a “celebration of life” while a person is still living, although hearing people give you weepy eulogies seems like it’d be a tad unnerving and surreal. Either way, Phillip gets through this curious job and meets the man who hired him, Shinji (Shogun’s Takehiro Hira), who owns a business called Rental Family, and hereby introduces us and our protag to the movie’s basic conceit. “We need a token white guy,” Shinji explains, and Phillip shrugs – work is work, I guess. It takes a last-second intervention to get Phillip to play the groom in an elaborate wedding to please the bride’s parents before she secrets away to Canada with her wife, but he gets the job done. And after Phillip apologizes for nearly torpedoing the endeavor – his coworkers, Aiko (Mari Yamamoto) and Kota (Kimura Bun) want him to be fired – Shinji starts giving him regular work.

Some of the gigs are simple: Playing a hooting-and-hollering fan of the singers at a karaoke bar, or playing video games with a lonely guy, for example. Others are more thorny, open-ended roles. In one, he poses as a journalist interviewing an elderly, once-famous actor, Kikuo (Akira Emoto), to boost the old man’s spirits as he deals with some form of dementia or memory loss; Kikuo wants Phillip to sneak him out and take him to the rural home where he grew up. In another, Hitomi (Shino Shinozaki) hires Phillip to pretend to be her daughter Mia’s (Shannon Mahina Gorman) estranged father so the young girl can get into a prestigious school; when Mia makes Phillip pinky-swear to “never leave again,” we know this is gonna be trouble. As expected, Phillip wrestles with the morality of what he’s doing. He knows it’s not right. Then again, he regularly pays a sex worker for “companionship,” so he knows a little something about transactional relationships.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Werner Herzog explored this exact subject matter in 2019’s Family Romance, LLC, although with considerably less commercial appeal, of course.

Performance Worth Watching: A significant argument can be made that most of Rental Family would crumble to pieces without Fraser’s wide-eyed, earnest-everyman performance. 

Sex And Skin: Nah.

Our Take: File this plot under Fire, playing with. It goes without saying that most people in this line of work, especially if they’re characters played by one of the most amiable and likable actors in Hollywood, would grow emotionally attached to their clients. Consider Phillip’s key clients: One’s a dying old man and the other is a little girl who’s never known her dad. They’re inherently lonely, and so is Phillip. Forging a connection is a foregone conclusion for anyone who isn’t a sociopath.

And so Rental Family tends to be a tell-me-something-I-don’t-know kind of movie with a disappointingly simple thematic approach to some potentially fascinating material. Hikari shows little interest in the subtextual ideas here: The diminished agency of women in Japanese culture – Hitomi is a single mother who needs Mia’s father to be present in order to get her into school, and the notion that a woman would go through all the pageantry of a Japanese wedding in order to attain her “freedom” from her parents is, frankly, shockingly regressive. Kikuo’s subplot only brushes against the old man’s existential struggles with memory loss, and therefore the loss of self, as he becomes a friend and father figure to Phillip. The veneer of deception inherent to Phillip’s work – which gives the “acting is just lying” argument lots of ammunition – indicts Japanese society’s emphasis on maintaining appearances, on “saving face” for purposes that are elusive to those of us from Western cultures.

Hikari essentially introduces us to these ideas, but has little to say about them beyond this is bad. Rental Family doesn’t seem interested in much beyond manipulating its audience with sentimentality. Notably, a sentimentality with compelling agency thanks to Fraser, whose performance frequently transcends the screenplay’s limitations, his undeniable humanity drawing us in and keeping us emotionally engaged, his unspoken physical performance meshing nicely with Hikari’s well-considered, occasionally evocative visual storytelling. Fraser’s interactions with his castmates – especially Yamamoto, despite their characters’ potentially fascinating friendship being backburnered – routinely keep the film afloat; together, they find the heart and soul of a story that believes it’s more poignant than it is. But some poignancy is better than none, I guess.

Our Call: Rental Family is a finely crafted melodrama with a strong central performance that nonetheless reeks of unfulfilled potential. Mixed feelings then, but it tugs at our heartstrings in a meaningful enough manner to warrant a mild recommendation. STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.