Six years ago, the inimitable Werner Herzog made “Family Romance, LLC,” an odd pseudo-documentary about a Japanese service that specialized in hiring actors to play a loved one, colleague or potential suitor — whatever the client required. The company was real (or inspired by one profiled in The New Yorker), but the examples were not. Need someone to absorb your wife’s anger over that extramarital affair without inconveniencing your mistress? Just ask Rental Family to send a proxy. Trying to fool your once-famous father into thinking he hasn’t been forgotten? Rental Family can send a “reporter” over to interview him.
Maybe Herzog isn’t so inimitable after all, for Japanese director Hikari (best known for “Beef”) has made a film in which Brendan Fraser embodies an American actor struggling to get by in Tokyo. His character, Phillip Vandarpleog, reluctantly agrees to work for the eponymous company, accepting a gig in which he’s been commissioned to play “sad American” at a man’s staged funeral. In some cultures, mourners are hired to grieve the death of a loved one. Here, a man lies in an open casket while actors — and presumably some real-life acquaintances as well — go through the motions of giving eulogies, with the overall-positive result that he emerges feeling like his life really matters.
Years earlier, Phillip landed a lucrative job as the mascot for a Japanese toothpaste brand. It meant dressing up in a giant tube and posing like a superhero, but folks still recognize him from those ads, and a cardboard standee of the character still dominates the tiny living room of his shoebox apartment. Lonely beyond words, Phillip still goes to auditions but has a hard time getting acting work in Tokyo, and he spends his evenings looking out his window at his neighbors’ lives, wishing there was more to his own. That’s when Phillip’s agent calls with an unusual offer, though she fails to brief him on his role, so Phillip arrives at the job (the faux funeral) not knowing what’s expected of him.
Companies like Rental Family exist all over Japan, and depending on what’s desired by the client, the actor’s duties can range from therapist to escort to straight-up con man. Put off by that first assignment — at one point, Phillip climbs into the coffin, as if wondering whether his own life has value — he’s reluctant to accept more work from Rental Family. But the pay’s not bad and there’s a lot more work for a white actor in this field than there is on Japanese TV, so he reluctantly agrees. Besides, like a singing telegram or a glorified birthday clown, he’s making the world a better place for his customers.
A movie like “Rental Family” lives or dies by its tone, and the one Hikari strikes is reflected in the concerned creases of Fraser’s forehead: It’s maudlin and unconvincing, means well but isn’t above manipulating us for the desired emotional outcome. Phillip pours too much of himself into each part, but the movie isn’t mean-spirited enough to treat him like a bad actor, depriving the project of some much-needed humor. Practically the only star who could handle this awkward blend of sincerity and sentimentality was Robin Williams, and rarely has a film premise seemed better suited to his skills.
If anything, “Rental Family” reminds us what Fraser was doing — or not doing — in the long stretch before his 2023 Oscar win, when the ’90s heartthrob who’d been so great in “Gods and Monsters” was waiting for another role with even a fraction of that complexity to come along. Self-pitying existential crisis seems to be his new brand, and while that worked for “The Whale,” it’s a bit of a downer in a movie like this, which would have really benefited from a less mopey interpretation of the part.
Phillip’s big crisis comes from a client (Shino Shinozaki) who needs someone to pose as her 11-year-old daughter’s long-absent father, in order to convince the selection committee at an elite private school to accept young Mia (Shannon Mahina Gorman). To complicate matters, he needs to convince the girl that he’s the real deal. Had this been a different kind of movie — the ingratiating big-studio version of what is instead a more independent Searchlight Pictures production — Phillip would have fallen for Mia’s mom and they all would have ended up happily living the lie he was hired to sell (in other words, the “Bicentennial Man” version).
Though light on style, “Rental Family” serves up some thoughtful emotional moments, as Phillip chooses to interpret his role with the company differently from his boss (“Shōgun” star Takehiro Hira). Just as an actor must get into character, Phillip finds the true motivation for these benign deceptions to be the good he’s doing others. From there, it’s not such a big leap to bending the rules on behalf of the sad souls he’s been asked to fool, as when he helps an elderly fellow “jailbreak” from home, risking his job — and a potential kidnapping charge — to help the man fulfill an unrequited wish. It all goes well until someone sees him in a TV movie, which is kind of what Hikari’s project feels like: a small-screen take on a cultural curiosity, featuring an actor with so much more to give.
