‘Rental Family’: Brendan Fraser Navigates the Role of a Lifetime in Hikari’s Gentle Yet Affecting Comedy

Sandra Miska

Brendan Fraser continues to take his craft to the next level in Hikari’s affecting comedy-drama “Rental Family.” The Oscar winner plays Phillip Vandarploeug, a middling American actor living in Japan. Phillip has been scraping by in Tokyo for the past seven years, playing mostly small parts, his largest role being the lead in a toothpaste commercial. In a surprising twist, his big break, the one that would finally bring him a steady income, involves no cameras. It is also his most difficult job to date, as he must search deep inside himself to create authentic characters.

After a last-minute booking to play a random American mourner at a mock funeral, Phillip catches the eye of Shinji (Takehiro Hira), an ingenious entrepreneur who runs a business renting actors to play roles in people’s lives. The rental family business is based on real-life companies in director and co-writer Hikari’s native Japan. Here, the filmmaker offers an intriguing glimpse into life in her country, depicting a society that is so innovative and advanced in many ways, but still lagging behind when it comes to attitudes pertaining to mental health, the LGBTQ community, and women who reject sexual mores.

Phillip’s first job involves masquerading as the fiancé of a young gay woman, Yoshie (Misato Morita), who stages a fake wedding to appease her parents before she emigrates to Canada. Although his conscience almost causes him to back out on the big day, Phillip ends up feeling good about the job and himself when he sees the end result. But the rental family gigs are not all warm and fuzzy, as Aiko (Mari Yamamoto), a female employee of Shinji, with whom Phillip ends up forging a bond, is repeatedly hired to play the fake mistresses of men caught cheating. Their real girlfriends are spared the wrath of their wives, but poor Aiko ends up getting screamed at, and even slapped on at least one occasion. 

Perhaps a big reason Phillip is a good fit for this job is because he is a bit of a blank slate himself in the beginning. The mild-mannered and easygoing man appears to have no family, not much going on outside of acting, and his only significant relationship that we see is with a kindhearted sex worker (Tamae Ando). However, as the story progresses, Fraser slowly peels back the layers of Phillip, who ends up emotionally pushing himself further than he ever thought possible, with stunning results. Shinji gets him two long-term gigs; first, playing a journalist interviewing Kikuo (Akira Emoto), an elderly actor whose daughter wants him to still feel special and important. His more meatier role involves pretending to be the father of 11-year-old Mia (Shannon Gorman), whose single mother (Shino Shinozaki) needs a man to help get her daughter into a prestigious school. This role is especially challenging, because not only is Phillip asked to fool the school, he is also hired to make Mia herself believe that he is her real father.

Fraser is wonderful as Phillip reconciles these fake personas with the very genuine feelings he ends up developing. Hikari eventually lays out an interesting moral dilemma for Phillip, and things become complicated once he starts prioritizing the needs of his “marks,” Kikuo and Mia, above his job duties. He even finds himself in some legal hot water at one point. Enhanced by an emotive score from Jónsi and Alex Somers, “Rental Family” is a gentle comedy, where both Fraser and Hikari do an admirable job of balancing the dark with the light, as well as exploring complex emotions in a delicate and thoughtful way. 

“Rental Family” releases Nov. 21 in theaters nationwide.