Philip Vandarploeg (Brendan Fraser) is an American actor living in Japan and struggling to find meaningful work outside of a few ad spots.  His agent calls him one morning with an urgent need for a role that ends up being a funeral mourner for a man who is not yet even dead.  Feeling even more hopeless than before, he is approached by Shinji (Takehiro Hira) who arranged this event and offers him a position at his company, Rental Family, where he would fill in various roles in the lives of his clients.  He poses as a husband for Yoshie (Misato Morita) who needs to get married to please her parents before she moves to Canada, a reporter working on a profile for retired actor Kikuo Hasegawa (Akira Emoto), and a father for a young girl, Mia (Shannon Mahina Gorman), who needs to show a complete family to better her chances at enrollment in a prestigious school. 

Rental Family, director Hikari’s sophomore feature effort, is a sentimental piece that debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival ahead of its theatrical release courtesy of Searchlight Pictures.  Running 110 minutes, the script was cowritten with Stephen Blahut, and the pair, weaving in themes of family and the unpredictable nature of life compose a poignant ode that the whole family can enjoy. 

Much of the marketing of the film features Fraser’s Philip in his role as father for young Mia.  While this is the central relationship of the film, the script first introduces us to the concept of a rental family through Philip’s marriage to Yoshie, a young lesbian woman who wants to move to Canada with her girlfriend but will be unable to leave the country without proper cause.  This is the watershed moment for the film as Akio (Mari Yamamoto) explains to a bewildered Phil the entire driving mission of Rental Family, and in turn to us, the film’s thesis.  She posits that by staging this wedding, Yoshie’s family gets to enjoy the memories and the fulfillment of tradition that they so value, while also opening up the world to Yoshi so that she may live her truth; the paradox of a little white lie.  For any in the audience that rebukes Akio’s logic, Rental Family will continue to brush up against their sensibilities, but for those who are willing to see this theory play out, they will be treated to a touching yarn that will continue to ask them to reevaluate and challenge their own perception and initial acceptance of Akio’s philosophy. 

Fulfilling the promise of the poster, soon enough, Philip is assigned to Hitomi (Shino Shinozaki), a single mother who needs to present a complete family unit to the admissions board to a new elementary school that could potentially set her daughter, Mia, on track through to her college years.  It is a noble cause, but, as with Yoshie, it is rooted in deceit.  This is also the relationship which the film spends the most time with as it is the most complex since it asks Philip to balance two relationships.  The script is much more interested in his role as a father than it is as a husband, and it pulls on the heart strings with just enough tension to keep us engaged even though we sit in an omnipotent position and know that this relationship is destined to end when the contract is up.  That being said, young Gorman is effusive and through her excitement at having her father back from the United States, we too fall into the lull provided by a family unit reunited.  Narratively, the film is structured almost as a romantic comedy, so the conceit is reveled to a heartbroken Mia late in the second act through a flicker of fate, and because we have become so endeared to this pair, our hearts break along with hers. 

The story is not solely between her and Philip, and much of the time not spent posing as her father, Philip takes on the mantle of a magazine reporter interviewing Kikuo in his home for a retrospective profile piece on the retired actor.  As a father in real life, Fraser no doubt found parallels to help shape his performance with Gorman and Shinozaki, but his role as a reporter also offers the actor some instances of art imitating life, too, albeit here a little more reflected and inversed.  In 2018, the actor sat for a profile by Zach Baron for GQ titles “What Ever Happened to Brendan Fraser?” which chronicled the late ninety and early aughts heartthrob and action star’s not quite hiatus but rather a recalibration and redefinition of his career.  In Rental Family, he sits on the other side of the recorder, and while the topics do not stay too focused on Kikuo’s work on screen, it serves to tee up the supporting evidence of Akio’s – and the film at large’s – thesis that shaping ourselves to be something or someone else in our lives is not that far removed of a concept, and that it is only being facilitated by services like Rental Family. 

Across their conversations, Kikuo convinces Philip to join him on a journey to the countryside to a small village where he grew up.  Once there, he uncovers a time capsule he buried years ago under a tree before he moved to the city.  Inside, letters and photographs of a young woman whom he loved but had to leave behind and life never brought him back to her.  The connection, though, is strong as ever as the old man sits hugged by the ancient roots of the tree and weeps for a love that was cut short.  It shows that even though some relationships are not lasting, it does not mean that they are not genuine.  Kikuo both loves this woman from his past, but also has a love in his heart for his wife and daughter. It is a powerful moment of catharsis, and it is filmed with reverent simplicity so that audiences can find reflections of their own lost connections and be drawn ever deeper into the emotion of the film and have it feel real. 

With Rental Family, Hikari and Blahut weave a story that offers Fraser a long runway to show off his dramatic chops.  They imbue the story with such sincerity that even when it peddles in tropes, the arcs feel like they are coming from a genuine place so that this blatantly manipulative film warms even the coldest of hearts.  By fortifying the story with some sharp humor, it keeps audiences on their toes, especially as it teeters into the Act Two fallout with Mia that shapes the conclusion. What stands out most about the film, though, is its complete and total desire to find understanding.  This is most obvious in Philip’s role as various figures in his clients’ lives, but even in the broader sense, it never ignores that fact that Philip is a fish out of water in Tokyo. The film goes to great length to show his assimilation and acceptance of way of life in a way that many of these transplant stories often do not.  It never treats Japanese culture as the butt of a joke, nor does it punch down on Philip for living in a country where he was not born.  Rental Family is a surprisingly complex yet delightfully pleasant film that can easily be grafted onto our own experience so that we leave the film with a new appreciation and reevaluation of our place in others’ lives, and just as importantly, their place in ours.