Hikari’s drama explores surrogate relationships with grace, even as its narrative gears grind
By James Verniere/Boston Movie News
Academy Award-winner Brendan Fraser (“The Whale”) returns to the big screen in the small, offbeat drama “Rental Family” as an American singleton fish-out-of-water named Philip Vandarpleog, who has lived in Tokyo for seven years and has not made much of a go of it. He lives alone in a tiny flat, especially for a gaijin (Japanese for “outsider”) of his size.
An actor by trade, we see him at an audition, then immobile in a chair, dressed as a tree. He gets around in Tokyo using its excellent public transportation system. At home, he has books about drama and a copy of Garson Kanin’s acclaimed 1979 novel “Moviola.” From his flat, Philip also has a “Rear Window”-type view of others in nearby flats, most of them families, although there is one old man alone, perhaps a chilling warning to him. Philip has an agent with whom he speaks on his cellphone. She tells him of a last-minute booking as a “sad American” at a funeral. He gets there late and discovers that it is a sham funeral for a man who is not dead, but wanted to experience it. He therefore hired a group of people to pretend to be friends and relatives. Philip is then hired by Shinji (Takashi Miike regular Takehiro Hira), the head of a small company, Rental Family, that provides “actors” who pretend to be friends, family members, or, in Philip’s case, the Canadian fiancée of a local woman who wants to get married in an elaborate ceremony attended by her family.
This is where “Rental Family” lost me. Directed and co-written by the single-named Hikari (“Beef”) and co-written by her and Stephen Blahut, also an executive producer, “Rental Family” asks you to take its very twee premise very seriously indeed. Philip is then hired to be both the formerly absent American father of a sad, little biracial girl named Mia Kawasaki (Shannon Mahina Gorman in a delightful debut) and a journalist interviewing an aged former actor and author named Kikuo Hasegawa, played by the venerable Akira Emoto of “The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi” and many more.
Thus, “Rental Family” becomes the story of both a sad little girl in need of a father figure and of an old man who is failing and wants to go on one last adventure to his distant hometown against the wishes of his protective daughter. Can you spell “tearjerker?” For Philip, being a well-paid imposter is better than starring in a commercial as a super-heroic tube of toothpaste. Shinji, who arrives home in the evenings to his wife and young son, who is somber because he missed “a penalty kick,” insists that his employees are just “actors playing roles.” They cannot get involved personally. Right.
In one scene, Philip plays at being Mia’s dad at a school event that fathers must attend (in Japan, they are strict about these things). At the event, she brings over a lonely little boy whose parents were unable to attend and asks Philip to be the boy’s father, too. Although Rental Family employees are not supposed to get emotionally involved, Philip and old Kikuo, who is obviously inspired by Akira Kurosawa’s immortal “Ikiru” (1952) and its dying protagonist, bond over shared interests. Philip takes Kikuo to a favorite restaurant, where the old man almost wanders off, and he takes Mia to a “Monster Cat Festival,” both in costumes. In another scene, Kikuo finds old photographs of his dead wife.
Despite his size and looks, Fraser can bring an extreme vulnerability to his roles, and this is no exception. Philip is a lost and mysterious loner, and we know remarkably little about him. He is both a fish out of water and someone who pretends to be other people. There is an existential question at the root of “Rental Family,” and the cast, including Mari Yamamoto as Philip’s coworker Aiko, is uniformly excellent, even if the machinations of the screenplay are a tad much. In fact, “Rental Family” bears a striking resemblance to the not-widely-seen 2019 Japan-set drama “Family Romance, LLC,” written and directed by the legendary Werner Herzog, which featured a non-professional Japanese cast. Herzog’s film was not widely distributed, but is available on streaming, DVD and Blu-Ray.
‘Rental Family’
Rating: PG-13 for thematic elements, some strong language, and suggestive material.
Cast: Brendan Fraser, Takehiro Hira, Mari Yamamoto, Shannon Mahina Gorman
Director: Hikari
Writers: Hikari, Stephen Blahut
Running time: 1 hour, 43 minutes
Where to watch: In theaters
Grade: B
Boston Movie News 