• Rental Family

3/1/26 (Sun)

A lonely gaijin (Brendan Fraser) living in Tokyo is struggling as a would-be actor since his starring role seven years earlier in a Japanese toothpaste commercial. He spends much of his time in his tiny apartment looking forlornly Rear Window-like at people in the various apartments on the other side. Summoned for a job one day, he is surprised to arrive at a funeral – and even more shocked when the corpse pops up from the coffin and thanks everyone.

It turns out that the mourners were simply actors, employed by the man to provide him comfort that he will be remembered and that his life was worth something. The bewildered Fraser catches the eye of a businessman, who turns out to be an agency for just such bit players. He hires Fraser to act out real-life roles.

At first, these are fairly harmless: he acts the groom for a lesbian who needs to marry for her family’s sake, and goes to a man’s home to play video games together. But the roles soon become more sinister. Most notably, a mother hires him to pretend to be the long-lost father of her mixed-raced daughter to get the girl into a private school, which involves lying to the girl herself, and a woman hires him to play a reporter to make an aging actor think that he’s still relevant. (He’s lucky: his female colleague has to play the mistress when husbands are caught in affairs, so that she has to apologize profusely and earn the wife’s wrath instead of the actual mistress.)

Though warned by his boss not to get emotionally involved, Fraser naturally comes to empathize with the targets of his deception. He behaves against the client’s express wishes in order to give the girl a real daddy and grant the actor his true wish to sneak off to the village of his youth. Both those stories end in schmaltz.

Hundreds of companies of this type do exist in Japan for various services, such as providing funeral mourners, but the plot here rests on some pretty questionable assumptions. For instance, it’s not explained why a small girl raised by a single Japanese mother and attending Japanese elementary school can speak native English, especially given that her American father left so long ago that she doesn’t remember him. In any case, the idea that the mother would be so emotionally manipulative as to lie to her daughter about her father and then have him dump her once the job is done – essentially forcing the girl to relive the trauma of desertion – is unrealistic by any measure. The writers (director Hikari and Stephen Blahut) could easily have had the mother explain to the girl that the man is simply playing the part of father and gotten the same mileage out of the story, i.e., from initial resistance to gradual acceptance. They’re either unimaginative or lazy; they seem to have Hollywood brains in their sentimental turns with both the child and the grandpa.

Still, the movie is generally restrained in its direction and acting, refraining from the usual emphasis on extremes like kawaii culture. Its main themes – the little lies we use to get through life, the need for human connection – are clear enough. The film does get some comic mileage out of the situation despite the impossibilities. The funniest moment is when the boss and his workers unexpectedly meet as fake policeman and fake lawyers in an attempt to get Fraser out of jail for kidnapping (it’s complicated). My favorite scene was when we realize that the boss’ dutiful wife and son are in fact actors themselves, hired so that someone is waiting for him when he returns to an empty home. Small touches like that make the film watchable.

The movie benefits big time from its cast, especially a very appealing Fraser. He has a hangdog expression and hesitant manner that suggest a perpetual victim, a humorous contrast with his oversized body. It’s a different approach from Lost in Translation, also about an American actor who came to Japan for a commercial. But this film ably avoids most of the tropes about weird Japanese practices, and Fraser plays the part of the long-suffering gaijin as if he’s lived it. Good work. He has ample support from Yamamoto Mari as his colleague and Shannon Mahina Gorman as the young girl. Emoto Akira chalks up yet another film as a fading old man, and Hira Takehiro is fine as the company boss.

The movie is enjoyable for what it is, but a little more thought would have made this so much better. So frustrating.