Directing: B-
Acting: B
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B
Editing: B-

There’s something about Brandan Fraser’s performance in Rental Family, a kind of forced “aw-shucks” quality I found slightly off putting. He also keeps doing this thing with his mouth, where he sort of scrunches his lips to one side. To be fair, it’s very different from anything he’s done in other roles, but all I could think about was how he was simply making specific acting choices for this character. But isn’t that the kicker—that I should not be conscious of acting choices? I should readily suspend disbelief, and accept Phillip Vanderploeg as an individual.

I feel bad dumping on Brendan Fraser like this; I do like him as an actor, generally speaking—his performance in The Whale was incredible, and was the only thing that kept me from dismissing that wildly problematic film completely. Considering these respective performances, I suppose the next step is toward the director, in this case a Japanese director named Hikari, who apparently goes professionally by one name, like Madonna or Beyoncé. She most recently directed three episodes of the excellent Netflix series Beef, and has one other feature film on her resume, about a young Japanese woman with cerebral palsy called 37 Seconds and which ironically had a runtime of 6,900 seconds (115 minutes). Anyway, I can only imagine that either Hikari was happy with the performance Brendan Fraser gave her, or this was what she coaxed out of him. Either way, I found it a little cloying.

The performances of everyone else in the cast ranges between pretty good to great—the latter applying to the very impressive 11-year-old Shannon Mahina Gorman, whose very presence improved Rental Family any time she was onscreen. Finding a child actor who is both talented and natural is a difficult feat. Gorman is biracial, as is the young character she plays, Mia, whose single mother hires the “Rental Family” agency to provide a stand-in American dad for her. Mia’s mom is trying to get her accepted into a good school, which she believes previously rejected her because of the absent dad. Enter Phillip, here playing another person as provided by the Rental Family agency.

Rental Family follows dual plot threads, one where Phillip bonds with Mia, and another where Phillip pretends to be a journalist interviewing an elderly actor named Kikuo (Akira Emote) who is afraid the country is forgetting his life’s work—his daughter hires the agency in an effort to make him feel better. The story moves into these other two plot threads after we see Phillip’s first job, as a hired groom at a wedding, staged for the benefit of the bride’s parents. This sequence ends with a particular reveal that I won’t spoil, except that it seems to serve as a justification for the agency’s existence, and is fairly moving.

But, thanks to an occasionally muddled script, cowritten by Hikari and American writer and executive producer Stephen Blahut, there are times when even Rental Family seems ambivalent about a service like this, which is apparently quite prevalent in Japan. Is Hikari making a statement, or a judgment, about them? I can’t quite tell. This film seems to support some of their services, such as what is revealed to be the reason for the wedding, but not some other services, such as “apology services” where cheating husbands hire a fake mistress to apologize to their wives. Do none of these husbands think of apologizing themselves?

Multiple times in Rental Family, a character will comment on how people outside of Japanese culture will never fully understand it. This is coincidentally in keeping with my experience of this film, which I could never fully connect with. I wanted more dimension to the characters, and particularly to Phillip, who spends far more time onscreen pretending to be someone he’s not. The only thing we know about why this “big American guy” has been living in Japan for the past seven years is that a widely seen toothpaste commercial was what brought him there to begin with. Do actors really move to Japan just for one commercial gig? I want to know more about his family back home, and why he had such an apparently absent dad. But, evidently the only reason we know even that much is so he can express reservations about playing a parent himself.

We lean early on that Phillip is lonely in Japan, no friends to speak of, no romantic partner, just a woman who is evidently a sex worker—also a very undeveloped character, although I can appreciate that at least in this movie she’s much more than just a sex object, a thoughtful woman who also provides Phillip companionship. Really, all the characters around Phillip are far more interesting than he is, not just because they are all have a fair amount more dimension to them, but because Phillip’s only mode seems to be uncomfortable awkwardness.

There’s nothing egregiously wrong with Rental Family, I just found it somewhat lacking. It’s a blandly pleasant entertainment, and I tend to want more than that. Others may locate more insight in it than I did. It won’t elicit much passion: it’s fine for what it is, and it won’t be long remembered.

*I kind of wish the movie were about her instead.*

Overall: B-