Three years since The Whale, and two-and-a-half since star Brendan Fraser shot up from has-been to Academy Award winner, the man’s back with another starring performance. He’s been in movies since then—Killers of the Flower Moon, Brothers, Sea Lions of the Galapagos—and next year he’ll play Dwight D. Eisenhower in Anthony Maras’ Pressure. Although The Whale was widely mocked, before and after the Oscar, Fraser came out of it basically unscathed. I loved the movie, and put it at the top of my best of 2022 list. That’s nuts in the same year as Tár, and even if The Whale had the same significant effect on me a second time around, it’s not that interesting or sophisticated a piece of material, especially compared to Todd Field’s film.
What made The Whale soar was Fraser. You didn’t need any of the meta-subtext about his blacklisting, or the numerous surgeries he endured after all those action movies and comedies he made in the 1990s and early-2000s—you just need to look into his eyes. Was the movie overwrought? Is Darren Aronofsky as humorless as he seems? Is it obviously based on a play? Yes, yes, yes, and it doesn’t matter, because Fraser makes it real. Any other actor and The Whale would’ve been a joke. I think a lot of people were unwilling to even give it a chance, turned off by the ultra-serious, somber, almost operatic tone of the movie and all of the hoopla around Fraser’s “long overdue triumph.” His Oscar was pre-ordained, the tears kept flowing, and even this year, you had Dwayne Johnson tearing up at the Venice premiere of The Smashing Machine, a movie that was made to be his Whale, which, nevertheless, moved just about no one.
In Rental Family, Fraser stars as an American actor living in Japan; he’s been there seven years, brought over for a typically lysergic toothpaste commercial, yet he remains an outsider, a Gaijin. Gigs are slow and silly—the movie opens with Fraser attending the fake funeral (think Albert Brooks on Curb Your Enthusiasm) as the “Sad American”—and he’s still holding out for a recurring role on something, somewhere, whether it’s in Japan or South Korea. Floundering, he accepts a morally dubious offer from a “rental family” service, which provides Japanese customers with actors and impersonators to smooth out their interpersonal and family lives. His first job involves posing as a woman’s husband for her family; only when Fraser accompanies her to her hotel room do we realize the woman’s gay, and one of her bridesmaids is her new wife. It’s Robin Hood enough that he continues with the firm.
The next gig is trickier: Fraser has to pose as a young girl’s absentee father so that she may get into a good school. Her mother hires him, and, naturally, the daughter is cold and manipulative toward him at first, then warms up, then gets rightfully pissed when the mother feels they’re getting too close and discontinues the service, and then finally tactfully makes up with him when she figures out what’s been done to her. So much lying for social propriety.
Unlike Stephen Silver, I didn’t think that Rental Family was straining for laughs, or even emphasized the often comical differences between Japanese and American society. This isn’t a fish-out-of-water story, it’s a generic prestige drama made for awards and, invariably, released at the end of the year. Predictable release strategies are one thing, but the outlines and grammar of these films hasn’t changed since Ordinary People in 1980, or Coming Home two years earlier. Dave Eggers nailed this type of movie (and novel) with the title of his book A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and that was 25 years ago. Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist held my attention for three-and-a-half hours, but I found it void of life or inspiration; it was as paint-by-numbers as Rental Family. But I was bored out of my mind watching the latter, sticking around only for Fraser and the hope that the movie would veer off into something unpredictable. But it’s hackneyed, plain, and uninspired, and far too long at 110 minutes.
Rental Family, with a better script, could’ve been Fraser’s comeback role; or, made 25 years earlier, a real box office hit. But the laws have changed and these dead languages aren’t speaking to anyone anymore.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @NickyOtisSmith