Recently, someone asked me which film I was about to see again, which, as you can imagine, occurs a lot. I said to them: “It’s this new Brendan Fraser film entitled” Rental Family “.” This is when the phone became silent. At any rate. After a while, they said they felt bad for Brendan Fraser, because he just won an Oscar and it seems that he was already playing in another banal family comedy like “Vengeance Furry” – the one where forest creatures were splashed with water on his pants, so he looks like a pee himself.
Believe me, the situation is far from this desire. “Rental Family” can look like a generic family film evaluated by PG, but the film wanted pictures is actually a tender and modest drama which happens to have a premise from the start of a family film classified PG. It is easy to see what attracted fraser in this material, because it is almost mechanically designed to make it beautiful as an actor and enchanting as a star.
“Rental Family” features Fraser in the role of Phillip Vandarplondeug, an American actor living in Japan, whose agent has apparently never suggested changing his family name. Phillip did not succeed, but there are a lot of roles for white token guys and he does not need a day job to complete his income, so he can’t hurt very much either.
One day, Phillip is hired for a new mysterious concert. He presents himself and realizes that he is a supplement in someone’s funeral. Except that no one films it. Phillip has wandered in the very real world of family rental services, where people hire actors to play a differently empty role in their lives. They need people to push the guest list during the holidays, or pretend to be friends and lovers, or replacements for the absent father of someone during parents-teacher meetings. And just like the other Phillip actor concerts, there is generally a role for another white guy at the same time.
The family rental services are not common in America, and in a lesser film, they could be the source of a cheap and judgment comedy. The director Hikari (“37 seconds”) and the co-series Stephen Blahut are trying to quickly remove the cultural shock from Phillip. During the first big concert in Phillip, he must pretend to marry a young Japanese, deceiving his family in the process, and Phillip finds this morally Dcanty. So much so that he is back almost to the last second. This particular vignette concludes in the most heroic possible way, depicting family rental services in an exceptionally positive light.
Subsequently, the colleague of Phillip gives him a severe speaking to his western attitude of judgment, the taking – and by extension, the American public – not to even have tried to understand the culture in which they are currently immersed. Phillip, who loves Japan and who makes his house there, realizes that he was wrong and kisses this new role. He becomes a fictitious father for a little girl who temporarily needs it, even if he will ultimately have to abandon her and break her heart. He also imitates a film critic and directs a series of interviews with an aging star, just to make man feel that the public has not forgotten it.
In short, the “rental family” explains why we are counting on the actors. The films and the pieces fill empty in our lives, giving us a romance when we do not have one, and the catharsis when fate does not reach. The actors of “Rental Family” descend from their scene and enter directly into the life of their client, offering a more immersive experience. It is a love letter with human performance, the type of roles that Brendan Fraser excels. This is no exception.
The Hikari film does not completely move away from the gray areas of the rental family services. The colleague of Phillip, played by Mari Yamamoto (“Monarch: Legacy of Monsters”), is often presented as the other woman in extramarital affairs, and takes all the blame for the betrayal of a cheating husband. It is humiliating and often abusive, and the “rental family” considers it as the dark side of this phenomenon. In these cases, work is not to contribute to people’s lives, it is a question of helping and encouraging these manipulative men and their misogyny.
All this is very interesting, even if it is chaotic tonnement. The “rental family” is, in turn, healthy and vicious, funny and severe, artificial and elegant. It is after all a film on the actors with lots of range, undergoing the unique challenges of their profession, and these changes serve the material well, but they do not always do wonders for the public. It is easy to fight against the way we are supposed to feel it all.
But again, this is not what we “feel” about rental families, it is a question of how we understand them. After watching this film, I understand the rental families better, but I still do not understand the practice well enough to judge, which also means that I do not understand enough rental families to determine if the “rental family” does justice on this subject. All I can say with certainty is that Hikari’s film is a complex conversation on the profession of acting, but is often sidelined in its own artificial artifices and manipulations, attracting attention to the artifice of a history on artifice.
“Rental Family” opens in theaters on November 21.
