Brendan Frasier is pitch perfect as an actor pretending to be real in this warmhearted drama about finding out who you are.
Rental Family
Starring Brendan Frasier, Takehiro Hira, Mari Yamamoto & Akira Emoto
Rated PG-13
Directed by Hikari
In theaters Friday, Nov. 21
Brendan Frasier stars as Phillip, an actor in a slump now living in Japan who takes a gig with a “Rental Family” service to “act” as characters in other people’s lives. “We help clients connect to what’s missing,” says the owner (Takehiro Hira) of the service. “We sell emotion.”
So, Phillip—whose most recent gigs include playing a tree and a tube of toothpaste—embarks on a new phase of his career, one which has him role-playing the groom at a wedding, a mourner at a funeral, and a daddy to little girl (Shannon Gorman, in a most impressive debut) who’s missing a father figure. The clients of the service all need or want something, or someone, they don’t have, and Phillip is there to fill in the gaps in their lives.
And Phillip, who’s been longing for more “roles with real meaning,” certainly finds it.
Frasier—who brought home an Oscar two years ago for his intensely moving starring role in The Whale—is pitch-perfect here as a “big American” outsider in a place with its own customs, heritage, spirituality and heightened sense of propriety. Scenes where he ducks down to pass through a door without bonking his head, or hunker over in a chair that’s too small, reinforce the movie’s idea that he’s a visitor, an interloper, someone who just doesn’t quite fit in—at least not at first.
But he comes to connect with the strangers with whom he’s been hired to interact, learning about them and caring about their lives. It starts to bug Phillip that he’s living a series of lies, pretending to be someone he isn’t. (Even as he tells Mia, the little girl, that “Sometimes its okay to pretend.”)
It all plays out with some twists and turns and surprises, especially when Mia’s mother (Shino Shinozaki), who’s hired Phillip, becomes jealous of her daughter’s fondness for him. Or the feisty senior citizen (esteemed Japanese actor Akira Emoto) with dementia who wants to take Phillip on a tender road trip down memory lane…before he forgets what it is that he wants to remember.
In the very capable hands of director Hikari (real name Mitsuyo Miyazaki), who also directed several episodes of the hit Netflix series Beef, it’s a warm, sweet mix of whimsy and heart. It hits home with its themes of loneliness and emotional need, wherever home might happen to be, and whether we need a bit of drama to spice up our lives, or just “someone to look us in the eye and show us we exist.”
It’s about fathers and sons and daughters, and the broader meaning of family, with a few existential lessons about life itself. It’s no coincidence that, at one point, a conversation is sparked by a 1963 jazz album by Charles Mingus (titled “Myself When I’m Real,” how fitting!) and an observation that jazz is all about “improvisation, chord changes and flow,” making the music mesh with the musicians making it. “Jazz is about adapting, says Kikuo, the older man who thinks Phillip is a writer doing a story on him. Hmmm, adapting…kinda like life.
You’ll watch Phillip learn to improvise, to change, to go with the flow and adapt, to mesh and help make the music of life all the sweeter for everyone his life touches. So that, in the end, he can he look himself in the eye—and see that his “lies” have led him to the truth.
—Neil Pond
The Media Tourist 