Review: Rental Family – The daddy returns

Directed by Hikari
Starring Brendan Fraser, Shannon Mahina Gorman, Akira Emoto

6.5/10

This quaint little light drama film has a quirky and fun concept to it, delving into the world of real-life actors in Japan. It’s something that really opens up the film’s unashamed sentimentality, which can make you forgive it when it gets so predictable you can just about play it all out in your head. Yet all these obvious plot points and big character moments end up being smaller than expected, as if the film wants to be sentimental but not always go all out with its sentimentality.

Philip (Brendan Fraser) is an American actor now working in Japan, getting the occasional TV show or toothpaste commercial appearance. He is hired by an unusual acting agency, who commit real-life acting gigs. Philip’s main role is to act as the estranged father of young Mia (Shannon Mahina Gorman), who’ll have to take some time to get used to.

It’s a pleasure to see Fraser in another lead role since his Oscar-winning one in The Whale. So much of the film’s emotional power is certainly being channelled through him, which he can do so effortlessly and without his performance ever feeling Oscar-baity. But the film doesn’t really let him open up his abilities like he did in The Whale, where he can really overpower the film with an emotional wallop.

This is a cute concept and one that can offer up a bunch of different scenarios for Philip to perform in and can even comment on the cultural differences in Japan that necessitate this peculiar kind of work. The film does have a few up its sleeve, with Philip’s first job acting as a husband so his “wife’s” parents can be satisfied with her marriage, all of which concludes revealing her reasons. It’s a satisfying reveal and done so well, embracing the sentimentality of the situation as Philip can slip away from this family, whose happy “wife” and parents have different versions of the truth.

But others don’t work as well. Philip is hired to act as a journalist interested in an ageing former actor, Kikuo (Akira Emoto). This would’ve been fine as yet another scenario to quickly show, but the film ends up spending more time with this story than it does with the surrogate father one. The only time the film commits to a big emotional moment is with these two, though it is done in not only a horribly clichéd, seen-it-done-before way, but it also feels so detached from the whole ‘make-believe’ theme the film was otherwise consistent with.

Rental Family concerns itself with a unique premise at its centre, and, aside from this one side-step, it keeps most of its focus on it. Though there’s certainly the feeling more could’ve been brought out of it, more on the emotional pressures, the cultural differences, and perhaps even linking it to the world of movie-making itself and its own form of make-believe. But Rental Family keeps itself incredibly safe, which can make it sometimes warmly satisfying, though most times unsatisfying.

DAVID MORGAN-BROWN