Cast Brendan Fraser in your movie if you want to issue a manifesto on earnestness. It’s not that he lacks the range to do anything else (certainly, no hearts were melting over his racist attorney in Killers of the Flower Moon). But the Oscar winner has quickly become a gift to any director in search of naked emotion, accessible instantly through those wide, blue eyes rimmed with tears and turned slightly up, as in a portrait of the Virgin Mary, towards the heavens. He’s a one-man empathy machine.
Fraser’s presence is crucial to Rental Family, director Hikari’s examination of one of the many ways in which we Band-Aid our loneliness, outside the AI chatbots, Instagram feeds, and plastic tchotchkes. Japan, here, has a culturally specific practice: the employment of strangers, like Fraser’s American actor Phillip Vanderploeg, to fill the missing presences in people’s lives.
As Hikari demonstrates, that encompasses a fairly broad spectrum: a gamer in search of a co-op buddy; a lesbian in need of a groom to present to her homophobic parents (she’s really wedded the “friend” standing patiently to the side); a man who stages his own funeral, complete with mourners, so he can remember why he’s alive.
It’s a practice already explored in Western cinema by some of its greatest nihilists. In Werner Herzog’s Family Romance, LLC (2019) and Yorgos Lanthimos’s Alps (2011), which focused specifically on the impersonation of dead relatives, the concern is primarily with the slipperiness of reality and identity. Hikari’s film offers a considered rebuttal. She’s a Japanese filmmaker who’s lived much of her life in the US, and there’s a sense here that Rental Family seeks to straddle both the insider and outsider viewpoints.
And with Fraser as her figurehead, it’s certainly a work of broad and deep compassion. But there are self-imposed limitations that you’d wish Hikari and her co-writer Stephen Blahut would cross, if not purely out of curiosity: bigger questions about the complicated dynamics at play, or a view of Tokyo that feels a little more quotidian and less the pristine postcard where, around every corner, there’s a cat monster festival and a pricey burlesque club.
Phillip, who has his own troubled history, has come to the city for a fresh start. His only success has been the role of a superhero mascot in a toothpaste commercial. And so he falls into a job at Rental Family, a company run by Shinji (Takehiro Hira), and is set up with two significant clients.
The first is a single mother, Hitomi (Shino Shinozaki), whose mixed-race daughter Mia (Shannon Gorman) needs a “father” to sit in on the interview for a prestigious secondary school. The second is Kikuo Hasegawa (Akira Emoto), an actor nearing the end of his life and in need of companionship. Phillip poses as a journalist shadowing him for a career retrospective. Mia, of course, charms him with her innocence, Kikuo with his wisdom.
Mia is told that Phillip is her actual father. So, what happens when the contract ends? How lasting can a connection be when it’s built on a lie? Rental Family sidesteps the full brunt of these questions, and the repercussions of Phillip’s colleague Aiko’s (Mari Yamamoto) work posing as various mistresses so that betrayed wives have someone else to blame other than their own husbands.
It’s not so curious about the “why” behind it all, besides Shinji’s rushed explanation that any form of mental distress is particularly stigmatised in Japan. Instead, Rental Family ends with the most on-the-nose of images: a reminder that Fraser, with those shimmery pools for eyes, is an endless source of feeling.
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Dir: Hikari. Starring: Brendan Fraser, Takehiro Hira, Mari Yamamoto, Shannon Mahina Gorman, Akira Emoto. Cert 12A, 110 minutes.
‘Rental Family’ is in cinemas from 16 January