I loved the premise of the movie Rental Family: “An American actor in Tokyo struggling to find purpose lands an unusual gig: working for a Japanese ‘rental family’ agency, playing stand-in roles for strangers.” Especially around the holidays, an increasing number of my acquaintances are looking for, or grafting onto, family.
Traveling throughout Tokyo, where he’s lived for seven years, the struggling actor Philip (Brendan Fraser) is uncomfortably large. Even the ceiling in his apartment seems too short.
He has moral ambivalence about his first couple of jobs and complains, “I’m messing with people’s lives.” His boss, Tada (Takehiro Hira), the owner of the agency, counters, “We sell emotions.” Another actor in the business is Aiko (Mari Yamamoto), who, among other roles, played a phony paramour of a cheating husband hired to apologize to his wife.
Philip takes on more complicated gigs. A mother (Shino Shinozaki) wants her bright, biracial daughter, Mia (Shannon Mahina Gorman), to get into a prestigious school, but the girl needs a “father.” A fading, but feisty, old actor Kikuo (Akira Emoto) wants to escape his controlling daughter for a brief return to his past. Both of these situations become more complicated than initially conceived.
Rental Family was directed and co-written by Hikari. I’ve learned, after seeing the film with my wife at the Spectrum theater at noontime the day before Thanksgiving, that the final scene was not in the original script.
Reviews
Sarah Vincent wrote: “While some may find ‘Rental Family’ treacly and television fare, others will walk away inspired.” We were in the latter category. “Mia and Kikuo’s stories feel like the real center… and Phillip just feels like a supporting character in their respective movies,” which worked.
The film didn’t explain everything, and that was fine. Roger Moore – no, not THAT Roger Moore – noted: “Hikari… doesn’t judge and doesn’t take sides in a ‘which culture gets it’ sense. There are merits and drawbacks to both the Eastern and Western ways of living.”
Critics were 87% positive, and audiences were 96% positive on Rotten Tomatoes. Many of the negative views complained that there was “little interest in uncovering the causes or conditions of loneliness,” which I thought was both unnecessary to do and somewhat obvious.
Not incidentally, there are real family rental service companies in Japan. As in the movie, “There have been times when the role has led to emotional entanglement.”
My only regret was that my wife and I were the ONLY two people in the theater.