RENTAL FAMILY is a delightful, heartwarming and laugh-out-loud funny film that flirts with a social critique of contemporary Japanese society but is ultimately uninterested in anything gritty. Its message is rather trite: kindness and empathy matter and the families we make are sometimes more fulfilling than those we are born with. But if the message is simple and obvious, it still hits home, especially in such dark and divisive times.
Brendan Fraser, last seen at the London Film Festival in a devastating performance in THE WHALE, now plays Phillip, an American out-of-work actor in Tokyo. Finally he finds a steadily paying gig being rented out to customers as a husband or father or friend. These rental families are apparently big business in Japan, affording lonely people solace, but also papering over social bigotry. A lesbian pretends to marry Phillip so she can leave Japan with her actual lover. A single-mother hires Phillip to be father to her child for an admissions interview at a snooty school. Neither would be necessary in a more liberal society but the movie is only glancingly interested in this. The film also draws a parallel between the actors providing emotional release and Phillip using a sex worker for physical release, and even goes so far as to humanise her. But it’s interesting that she’s the only character with whom Phillip has no resolution. Perhaps that would have been a little too much reality.
As Phillip, Brendan plays to his public persona as a kind, sweet, charming, schlubby middle-aged man. In fact pretty much every character in this film is kind, sweet and charming. The exception might be legendary Japanese actor Akira Emoto who plays an old and retired actor suffering from dementia. That guy has a rogueish swagger all of his own and earns both the biggest belly laugh and creates the most emotional scene of the movie.
Writer-director Hikari (Beef) and her co-writer Stephen Blahut do a serviceable job with plot and direction although most viewers will guess the plot twists. The whole point of this film is NOT to shock and awe but to delight, and in that end it succeeds. It’s just a shame it hadn’t dared to be a little spikier.
RENTAL FAMILY is rated PG-13 and has a running time of 103 minutes. It played Toronto and London. It opens the US on November 21st and in the UK on January 9th.
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