Rental Family - In the Lives of Others: Brendan Fraser between emotion and rhetoric

American Phillip Vandarploeg is an aspiring actor who has lived in Japan for seven years, hoping to find success after a toothpaste commercial he starred in brought him some notoriety. But for a long time now, no significant roles have come his way, to the point where he is considering giving up everything, as he doesn't even have a family or lasting connections.

In Rental Family - In the Lives of Others, his agent gets him an unusual assignment at an agency that provides stand-ins to impersonate family members, friends, colleagues, or anyone else requested by clients. This is a dramatically real phenomenon in Japan since 1980, reflecting a society where loneliness and difficulty in forming human relationships are widespread problems. Phillip, initially reluctant, soon embraces this new way of "acting," but when he becomes attached to some of the people he is "lying" to, including a child who believes him to be her never-met father and an elderly actor suffering from memory problems, he will have to confront his own conscience.

Broken Families to Put Back Together

A film that risks appearing outdated given the political climate that has spread in the Land of the Rising Sun in recent months, with an increasing closure towards the outside world and hostility towards foreign tourists, leaves little room for tear-jerking stories like this. Brendan Fraser's gaijin thus risks being a "gentle giant" out of time, even if placed in a very common reality like that of rental people, which cinema has already told us about several times in the past. One only needs to think of perhaps the most conceptually similar title on the subject released at the end of the last decade, namely the never-too-often cited Family Romance, LLC (2019) by an unprecedented Werner Herzog on a Japanese sojourn.

A film, it must be said, much more sincere and successful than Rental Family - In the Lives of Others, which instead approaches the theme from a more Western point of view, something paradoxical given that in this case, behind the camera, we find Hikari, a director originally from Osaka whom we have already appreciated in the series Beef, distributed on Netflix. And instead here, the two hours of viewing abound in a typically Hollywoodian rhetoric, soundtrack included, with numerous melodramatic turns that sink into treacle, trying to hit, and sink, with a certain insistence the most emotional viewer.

Insights and Clichés

Let's be clear, in at least a couple of passages the attempt is successful and the story manages to break down barriers, cultural and otherwise, allowing viewers to become invested in the private lives of these characters in search of love or friendship, with the line between fiction and truth becoming increasingly thin. But at the same time, it is evident how everything has been deliberately planned, removing spontaneity even from Fraser's willing performance, who unfortunately often has to resort to a perpetually afflicted expression, even beyond measure.

Rental Family - In the Lives of Others wants everything and immediately and requires an equally (un)demanding audience, ready to be lulled by what they are seeing without too much desire to discover how plausible or not it might be. The storytelling style relies on a canonical cinematic grammar, almost timidly observing the protagonists without ever truly entering their lives, limiting itself to a superficial portrait based on those poignant archetypes for easy tears. 

The film thus proceeds through a series of more or less significant episodes, focusing on some key figures who then become the beating heart of the entire narrative, in a hundred-plus minutes of viewing that, especially in the second half, once the cyclical nature of the formula is understood, become quite heavy before that obviously cathartic epilogue.