‘Rental Family’ Shines Spotlight on Wild Cultural Practice

Here’s a shock – hiring an actor to play a long-lost loved one might come with emotional baggage.

The creative team behind “Rental Family” hopes that Billboard-sized revelation is enough to power an Oscar-bait drama. The well-intentioned film, starring an even more well-intentioned Brendan Fraser, shares a curious Japanese practice.

On paper, it’s fine fodder for a feature film. In reality, director HIKARI’s vision lacks purpose and, most importantly, a sense of narrative surprise.

Fraser stars as Phillip, a middle-aged actor still pining for his big break. He’s found a home for himself in Japan, but relocating to a foreign culture hasn’t afforded him many professional breaks.

He even serves as an “American mourner,” a job that proves baffling on a few levels. It’s a minor moment, but the film never tops this sequence.

It’s odd, fresh and unnerving, and it allows Phillip to explore some all too human reactions.

The dispiriting gig isn’t for naught. It introduces him to Rental Family, a firm that could use a “token white guy” like Phillip. The company hires actors to play various “roles” for clients. If a woman is in love with another woman, she can hire a Rental Family actor to pretend to be her husband.

It’s not a real relationship, but it helps calm the gay panic fears within her family.

Phillip is initially wary of the gig, but he’s talked into the role by the company’s persuasive boss Shinji (Takehiro Hira). The wannabe actor proves to be a quick study, but by entering the lives of people in emotional distress he realizes the limits of the job.

Fraser’s Phillip wants to help his clients in more ways than one. He becomes invested in their struggles, and that forces him to confront the gig’s darker side. He’s playing make believe with real people, and any miscue won’t involve a second take or embarrassing stage gaffe.

People could get hurt.

“Rental Family” leans on a real-life Japanese practice, one that opens up a world of dramatic possibilities. The film settles for the most obvious conflicts, oblivious to darker themes that could flow from the practice.

Fraser is adept at the task before him, but wouldn’t it be more interesting if his character’s flaws bubbled to the surface? Actors can have notoriously thin skins, for example. Or, Phillip could lean into the power he wields at the risk of his clients’ emotional well-being.

Phillip’s bond with a young girl (Shannon Mahina Gorman) who never knew her real father is the heart of the story, but once again the dramatic tension proves predictable and, even worse, safe.

HIKARI’s script has little interest in nuance. It’s all surface-level observations that fail to explore the ramifications of the Rental Family practive.

Inspirational stories matter. So do films that skim across the human experience, leaving plenty unexplored but still touching our hearts. What’s missing here is a sense of wonder, a feeling that we don’t quite know where the story will head at any given moment.

The film makes fine use of its Tokyo setting, using lush backgrounds and slick urban landscapes to capture a culture most Americans rarely see. That, plus the unique concept in play, suggest Fraser’s “Whale” resurgence was no fluke.

We can’t blame the Oscar winner for a story that lets him and the plot’s potential down.

HiT or Miss: “Rental Family” has a can’t miss premise but refuses to follow the story’s fascinating angles.

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