Fraser gets a lease on life in lovely ‘Rental Family’
As Shakespeare famously wrote, “All the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players.” It’s a quote as perfectly suited to “Rental Family” as Brendan Fraser is to the role of a failed thespian learning that there’s truth in illusion.
It’s not much of a departure for the Oscar-winner, who seems to gravitate toward playing big lugs with even bigger feelings. But this time it carries more resonance, more meaning. He’s not just performing; he’s reaching deeper to communicate the essence of human connection and to solidify the idea that no man is an island. If there are some laughs and some tears along the way, so be it. After all, that’s what life and this charming movie are all about.
Yet, I can’t imagine it working as well as it does without Fraser. He’s the epitome of ideal casting as Phillip Vanderploeg, an ex-pat American eeking out a living fighting cavities as the star of elaborate dental hygiene commercials in which he literally puts a human face on a walking, talking six-foot-tall tube of toothpaste. It garners him a modicum of fame. More importantly, it covers the rent on his Tokyo flat. But it does nothing to ease his acute loneliness and failure.
That all begins to change when his agent phones, offering him a gig at an agency that rents actors to masquerade as family members or provide companionship to the isolated and the friendless. “To help them connect to what’s missing in their lives,” he’s told. Initially, Phillip adopts a negative view. Not just because he thinks playing “the token white guy” is beneath him, but because he isn’t comfortable with the dishonesty of pretending to be something he’s not. The irony, of course, is that his fear is the very definition of “acting.”
Director Hikari, aka Mitsuyo Miyasaki, has a lot of fun expanding on that paradox by exploring Phillip’s intensifying confusion over the nexus of performance and genuine emotion. As his guilt expands, so does his empathy, growing particularly close to two of the people he is hired to mislead.
The first is Mia (superb newcomer Shannon Gordon), a biracial 11-year-old girl whose single mom, Hitome (Shino Shinozaki), employs Phillip as a stand-in for the girl’s American father, who abandoned them years ago. The other is Kikuo (the great Akira Emoto), a legendary actor whose daughter hires Phillip to lift her aged dad’s spirits by having him portray an American journalist profiling the old man.
Despite repeated warnings from his boss (Takehiro Hira from TV’s “Shogun”) at the Family Rental agency (yes, these really do exist) to not get close to his clients, Phillip can’t help but involuntarily evolve into a method actor. In no time, he believes he IS Mia’s dad and IS Kikuo’s chronicler/ego builder.
You can pretty much guess the rest, including Phillip’s increasing attraction to his cynical co-worker, Aiko (Mari Yamamoto). Unpredictability is practically nonexistent in Hikari’s script, co-written with Stephen Blahut. But emotional manipulation is. And it’s shameless at times. But damned if this film doesn’t get to you.
Credit that to the depth of talent Hikari has at her disposal. As she proved with her three-episode stint on the Netflix smash “Beef,” Hikari is an expert at peeling back the onion on characters shrouded beneath layers of self-protective armor. And she does it without ever being cloying or melodramatic. There’s a naturalness to her storytelling that heightens the authenticity of the transformations. You believe in these little miracles, as do her actors.
They also all know their place, which is in the service of Fraser, summoning perhaps the finest work of his career, including his Oscar-winning turn in Darren Aronofsky’s “The Whale.” I wasn’t a fan of that contrived drivel, but I am here because there’s not a synthetic bone in this movie’s body. It shows in the intimate interactions between Fraser and Gordon, a real find, and Fraser and Emoto. The chemistry is palpable. So is the heart. Be prepared for yours to melt.
Movie review
Rental Family
Rated: PG-13 for some strong language, thematic elements, suggestive material
Cast: Brendan Fraser, Takehiro Hira, Mari Yamamoto, Akira Emoto, Shannon Gorman and Shino Shinozaki
Director: Hikari
Writer: Hikari and Stephen Blahut
Runtime: 110 minutes
Where: Currently in theaters
Grade: B+
