Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Hikari
Starring: Brendan Fraser, Takehiro Hira, Mari Yamamoto, Akira Emoto, Shannon Gorman
If you've seen Werner Herzog's Family Romance, LLC, you've already seen a far better version of director Hikari's Family Rental. That's not to say Family Rental is a bad movie. It's the very definition of "fine," but in skewing so close to the central plot of Herzog's film (to such a degree that you wonder how it gets away without crediting the German) and centring the drama on an American, it plays very much like a Hollywood remake of Family Romance, LLC, with all the contemplative subtlety of Herzog's film replaced by cloying sentimentality.
Japan is home to a curious phenomenon known as the "rental family." Agencies employ actors who can be hired by clients to pose as family or friends, or even the clients themselves. Herzog's meta-fictional film saw a real-life rental family actor take the lead role of a fictional version of himself hired to play the role of a long absent father to a young girl. Hikari's film liberally borrows this plot, swapping in a struggling American actor played by a newly resurgent Brendan Fraser.
Seven years after being the face of a cheesy but popular toothpaste commercial, Tokyo-based American actor Phillip (Fraser) is struggling to find steady work when he stumbles upon a rental family agency run by Shinji (Takehiro Hira), who is in need of a token white guy. After initial reservations, Phillip settles into and even embraces his strange new job.
The narrative focusses mainly on two of Phillip's roles. One sees him play the father of Mia (Shannon Gorman), a young mixed-race girl whose real father disappeared soon after her birth. Mia's mother Hitomi (Shino Shinozaki) wants to enrol her daughter in a prestigious school and knows that presenting herself as a single mother will greatly lessen her chances of impressing the school admissions board. Another of Phillip's jobs requires him to pose as an American journalist interviewing retired actor Kikuo (Akira Emoto), whose daughter (Sei Matobu) worries that her father feels he is becoming irrelevant.
Both of these jobs see Phillip embrace the roles so much that the line between artifice and reality begins to blur. More so than his clients, playing such roles becomes therapeutic for Phillip himself. Interacting with Kikuo - who convinces Phillip to take him on a perilous expedition to his old home hundreds of miles away from Tokyo - allows Phillip to atone for not being around for his father's final days. Spending time with Mia develops paternal feelings in Phillip, leading him to cross professional lines in questioning her mother's parental methods. In a film that is often too blunt in its messaging, Hikari allows for a degree of ambiguity when Phillip tells Kikuo he has a daughter to whom he would like to be more of a father. It's left to us to ponder if he is speaking about Mia or if he has an actual estranged daughter back in America.
Directed by the Japanese Hikari and co-written with an American in Stephen Blahut, Rental Family often feels like a clash of two cultures. A lot of it plays very Japanese, especially the non-judgemental scenes of Phillip enjoying the company of a sex worker, but it too often devolves into Hollywood mawkishness. Fraser's expressive face does enough heavy lifting that we don't need Phillip to verbalise the film's themes quite as often as he and other characters do.
Hikari's film is critical of certain aspects of Japanese society that certainly need calling out, but it's uncomfortable watching a white westerner be the one to provide such scorn. The film's lead is an American for purely commercial reasons, but this conceit causes us to question how someone who stands out so much (Fraser often appears like a lumbering giant as he walks through diminutive Japanese crowds) would be able to pull off such clandestine work. When someone discovers Phillip's ruse late on by spotting him in a TV commercial, we're left to wonder why it took them so long. After all, the film makes it clear that Phillip's toothpaste advert was something of a phenomenon.
Rental Family's biggest issue is that it never truly reckons with how unsavoury it is for adults to gaslight a young child into falling in love with a stranger whom they believe to be their father. What makes it arguably worse is how charming the chemistry is between Fraser and Gorman, the latter a sensational find whose performance will melt the most cynical of viewers' hearts. Phillip becomes a genuine father figure to Mia, but unlike Family Romance, LLC, the film refuses to examine just how cruel this is. Not to mention the ickiness of a mother happily leaving her child alone with a strange adult male all day.
Ironically, there is a minor subplot that might have made for a far more interesting and original movie, one that would make Hikari's film stand on its own rather than drawing inevitable comparisons with Herzog's gem. Phillip's first job sees him play the role of a Canadian man in a fake marriage to a young woman set to elope with her lesbian lover. The woman needs to leave Japan to live her true life but doesn't want to hurt her parents in the process. It's a universal gay experience but one rarely addressed on film, and it seems a waste to relegate it to a brief aside here in favour of a main plotline we've already seen handled with far more grace by Herzog.
Rental Family is in UK/ROI cinemas from January 16th.
