Blurring the Lines: A Method to Their Acting

The recently concluded AFI Film Festival, which is L.A.’s biggest and best filmfest, screened 160-plus features and documentaries. One of the best things about these fetes is that viewers get a chance to see films that are off the beaten motion picture path, on the big screen, and sometimes with major talents making personal appearances. In this day and age of superhero movies, sequels, and other highly derivative fare, watching Rental Family is – as Monty Python used to gleefully proclaim – “And now, for something completely different.”

Like German helmer Wim Wenders’ 2023 Perfect Days, director/co-writer Hikari’s (Netflix’s Beef) Rental Family is completely shot and set in Japan. The utterly charming and disarming Rental Family also has a premise I don’t recall ever seeing in a feature before (although in 2019 Werner Herzog made the semi-documentary Family Romance, LLC): Phillip Vandarpleog (Brendan Fraser) is an American actor who has somehow wound up at Japan, where he experiences the vicissitudes of most wannabes who assail the acting profession. His career is hit and miss; sometimes Phillip scores a commercial or bit part, but mostly he’s scraping by, and as a “gaijin” in Tokyo, he’s an outsider and lonely.

That is, until he stumbles his way into the part of a lifetime: Working for an agency, operated by Tada (Takehiro Hira, who audiences will recognize from the great FX TV series Shōgun), that hires actors out to do role-playing. For a fee, these thesps show up at faux funerals as mourners (for clients in caskets who are staging their own memorial services) or as long, lost relatives, and so on. They are, in a sense, emotional prostitutes, who sell companionship, personalities – but not sex.

Such is the case with Phillip, who is commissioned through the eponymous agency by a mother (Shino Shinozaki) to play the absentee father of an apparently mixed race 11-year-old child, Mia Kawasaki (Shannon Mahina Gorman who, in her very first production stars opposite an Academy Award winning actor). Mia hasn’t the faintest idea that Phillip is an impostor, hired to portray her dad so she can be admitted to a select, hard to get into school. As the childless Phillip and the unsuspecting Mia develop a father-daughter bond, complications ensue.

Rental Family is a beautiful, poignant movie about human relationships, and perhaps above all else, a rumination on the nature of the art and craft of acting. Where does “acting” end and “being” begin? This is underscored by another role Phillip is hired to play: As a journalist commissioned to interview a former Japanese star, Kikuo Hasegawa (depicted by an actual longtime Japanese movie star, Akira Emoto, who has more than 300 screen credits at IMDB.com, including for 2003’s The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi and 2016’s Shin Godzilla). In his guise as an entertainment reporter, Phillip is supposed to convince the aging, over the hill onetime actor whose star has dimmed that he’s still a popular celebrity, but Phillip and Kikuo also develop a personal bond, becoming friends.

After the AFI screening, Hikari made a personal appearance with Brendan Fraser and co-star Mari Yamamoto, who plays Aiko, another employee of the titular Rental Agency who, like the firm’s other thesps, has her own backstory. Hikari assured the AFI audience that there really are businesses in Japan like the one dramatized in her movie. In person, Hikari belied stereotypes of Japanese people as being demure conformists and with her offbeat sensibility she reminded me of that kooky kabuki, comedienne Tamayo Otsuki. In person, Fraser, who earned the Oscar for 2022’s The Whale, was personable and down to earth. Rental Agency is one of Fraser’s best roles since 1998’s Gods and Monsters and 2002’s The Quiet American – and lest we forget, 1997’s George of the Jungle.

The highly recommended Rental Agency is in Japanese and English with English subtitles and theatrically opens wide on November 21.