A struggling actor takes a job with a friends-and-family-for-hire agency. But some of the roles he’s hired to play have a major emotional impact on him. Rental Family comes with thoughtful insights about our need for human connection, especially when it comes to family. But there’s also some sexual immorality, drinking and a few instances of coarse language in the mix.
Phillip Vandarpleog was once a star. Of course, he was a star situated in a very small constellation.
Phillip was known all across Tokyo as the “Toothpaste Man,” the larger-than-life superhero mascot of a well-known Japanese toiletry brand. It was a pretty lucrative gig that motivated him to move to Japan several years back. But you can only squeeze a commercial career in toothpaste for so long.
These days, Phillip is a “big American” actor who roams Japan (trying fruitlessly to squeeze into local rail cars and tiny automobiles), auditioning for anything that might fit his niche.
After too many rejections to count, his agent finally lands him a last-minute bit part. At first, Phillip thinks it’s a play or something—a show that demands he wear his own suit. But when he gets to the contracted location, he realizes that he’s been asked to join a fake group of mourners. They’re part of a mock funeral for a not-yet-dead dude who lies in a coffin, listening to people eulogize his passing.
Phillip is a bit flummoxed. But he’s soon recruited by the agency that set up the gig. It’s a “Rental Family” business, dispatching actors to play whatever rent-by-the-hour role a client might desire. Do you need an overbearing boss to put you in your place? Or a fake mistress to absorb your wife’s anger? This rental agency has the actors and props to fill any need. Sometimes folks hire the agency to fool observers; other times, the actors help individuals work through some sort of personal sense of emptiness or guilt.
And Phillip? Well, he’s just desperate enough to sign on for whatever roles the agency might require. Soon after the mourning gig, he plays a reporter, interviewing an old actor who no one remembers. After that, he plays the best bud of a video gamer who never put his controller down long enough to make friends. He even plays the faux fiancé of a young woman who wants someone solid to introduce to her parents.
It’s when Phillip is given the role of a dad, though, that things get a bit tough. He has to lie to a 9-year-old and fill in for her missing American father so that she can get into a good school. But this young girl so sincerely needs a father in her life. They connect so well. And his “role” starts becoming so much more than a part to play—to her and to him.
This young girl, Mia, has reminded Phillip just how lonely he has become. And how much he wishes that he really could be a dad who guides, who listens … who loves.
This isn’t supposed to be how the job works. But Phillip isn’t sure how to stop playing a part that he can’t keep playing.
Rental Family suggests that we’re all in need of companionship and friends. And it wonders aloud: If someone plays a “role” to give someone real comfort, does it matter that it’s “fake”?
Phillip’s rental agency boss, Shinji Tada, explains that their job as surrogate members of someone’s family actually has a therapeutic benefit to the person hiring them. “We sell emotion,” Shinji Tada explains. “You just have to help clients connect with their feelings.” Another individual notes, “Sometimes all we need is to have someone look us in the eye to remind us we exist.”
And, indeed, we do see Phillip make a difference in people’s lives simply by listening and relating to their concerns.
That said, Phillip and another woman at the agency, Aiko, begin to worry about the toll their regular dishonesty is taking—both on their clients and on themselves. So they both decide to step away from lying to clients.
Through his relationship with Mia, Phillip realizes that he longs to be a father. In fact, giving of himself as a dad is, in a sense, a therapeutically healing balm for the fact that he never had the love of a father himself.
Phillip says he never connected with church when his mom took him as a boy. But while playing the role of a reporter interviewing an elderly actor, Kikuo, he watches the man pray before several shrines. And Kikuo talks in broad terms about his belief that “God exists in all things. God exists within us, too.” Kikuo later dies, and Phillip prays before a shrine on his behalf.
Phillip plays a woman’s fiancé to help her trick her parents: She’s really marrying another woman and then moving away—and she doesn’t want her family to know the truth.
Phillip himself hires a sexual surrogate for conversation and sexual interludes. We see them together in bed and in a bubble bath. They hug and kiss but their nakedness is covered.
Phillip accompanies a client to an adult club where they watch a woman in a silky robe dancing on stage. It’s obvious that the woman has no clothes beneath her flowing garment, but the camera doesn’t catch any physical details.
A man hires Aiko to portray his mistress so that he can hide his real mistress from his wife. (Aiko is called upon to play that same role for a different man. But she is honest with the wife in that case, telling the woman she deserves better.)
While playing a mistress, one agency actress (Aiko) is slapped across the face by an angry wife. An elderly man collapses from fatigue.
There are two f-words, two s-words and a crude reference to male genitalia in the movie’s dialogue.
We see many people (including Phillip) drink beer, wine and sake at various points throughout the film.
Because of the nature of the “Rental Family,” there is quite a bit of lying going on. It’s when Phillip is hired by Mia’s mom, however, that the dishonesty begins to sting: Phillip’s relationship with Mia grows closer, and the girl clings to him for attention and support. He tries to obey Mia’s mom and keep things relatively impersonal, but he’s unable to ignore the girl’s emotional needs.
A guy hires the agency to set up a business meeting where he is verbally berated for stealing something from work.
An elderly man travels many miles with Phillip to find hidden items that he buried many years before. While looking back at the life he walked away from (and pictures of a wife he left behind) he mourns over all he has lost because of his poor choices.
We live in a very odd world. Even though we’re more connected by today’s technology than ever before, we’re also more collectively lonely. Here, Japanese filmmaker Hikari uses that universal sense of detachment—which is particularly pervasive in Japan—to give us some thoughtful insights into our need for human connection.
Rental Family is a gentle and touching dramedy about people who so long for human relationships—a listening ear, a friendly smile, a hand to hold—that they’re willing to pay for it by the hour.
The film delivers solid statements about holding to family and putting a higher priority on slowing down, listening to others and being honest. Brendan Fraser plays his galumphy American role to a tender T, and he almost singlehandedly makes this a quietly satisfying feel-good movie. This is also one of those rare films that gives audiences a wonderful sense of Japanese culture without falling into any typical Hollywood stereotypes.
However, Rental Family does fall into some Hollywood routines when it comes to its loose sexual morals, its abundant drinking and a few inclusions of coarse language. Those things won’t necessarily cancel out all the good this film has to offer. But they’re another cost to consider for this movie’s hour and 40 minutes of company.
After spending more than two decades touring, directing, writing and producing for Christian theater and radio (most recently for Adventures in Odyssey, which he still contributes to), Bob joined the Plugged In staff to help us focus more heavily on video games. He is also one of our primary movie reviewers.
