Brendan Fraser has been through a lot; he was off the radar for a long time, and he’s made an inspiring and unheralded comeback, winning an Oscar three years ago and returning to leading-man status. It’s one of those back-from-the-brink stories that everyone loves, especially at awards time. I feel bad that I’ve disliked so much of the actor’s post-comeback work, aside from his unfairly-maligned small role as a yelling lawyer in Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon.
The Whale, his Oscar-winning return, was a vile, mean-spirited film. And now there’s Rental Family, another prominent Fraser film. More than one critic who saw Rental Family at the Toronto Film Festival remarked that it seemed engineered to win that festival’s audience award. It didn’t. It’s not nearly as noxious as The Whale, but Rental Family is an oddity, one that aims for the heartstrings, but mostly devolves into predictable schmaltz. The film, directed by the Japanese-American directo Hikari, features some pretty photography of Tokyo, but that’s not enough.
Fraser plays Phillip Vandarpleog, a depressed, has-been American actor, living in Tokyo. That’s the premise of Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation, but rather than get millions for a whiskey commercial and hang around a hotel with Scarlett Johansson, Fraser’s character takes a different sort of acting job. There’s not much call in Japanese movies and TV for middle-aged white guy actors, so instead he takes a position with a company to impersonate people’s relatives and other loved ones, in various real-life situations. This is real in Japan, and Werner Herzog made a pseudo-documentary, Family Romance, LLC, about the same phenomenon four years ago. One scene, involving a fake funeral, was supposedly in the Herzog version as well.
A young woman wants to do that thing, a staple of sitcoms since the 1960s, where she has someone pose as her boyfriend to meet her parents? Need someone to pose as a journalist to pretend to profile an aging creative legend? Those are the jobs to be done. Fraser’s character takes on two prominent jobs: in one, he’s to portray a journalist interviewing an older man and letting him fulfill one last wish. In the other, he’s posing as the father of a young girl who doesn’t remember her real father, to help her gain admission to a private school. Will Fraser’s character bond with his “scene partners,” cure his loneliness, and learn to be the good father he never had, and never was?
I had a couple of big objections to Rental Family: more than anything else, the plot with the little girl is a lot more cruel than the screenplay realizes, to the point where it overwhelms everything else. She’s already been abandoned by her real father, to lie to her that this new guy is her father, who’s not going to be around forever, either? Second, it’s obvious, from the opening 10 minutes, where everything’s going. Additionally, the film’s scored by Jón Þór "Jónsi" Birgisson, of the Icelandic band Sigur Rós, and while there’s some decent material in the score, it’s nowhere near the heights of some of the great movie music contributed over the years by that band.
And as someone who recently visited Japan myself, I noticed that too large a percentage of this movie’s humor is derived from the idea that “those Japanese people sure are silly, huh?” That was a critique that some leveled at Lost in Translation, but it’s more true of Rental Family. I really want to see Brendan Fraser’s comeback last, but he needs to find some better material.