Knock on Wood

You don’t have to know a lot about Japan to know that its culture is a very hierarchical one. It puts a lot of emphasis on adhering to its norms and doesn’t leave a lot of room for big expressions of emotion. The fact that a lot of interactions in Japanese culture are so prescribed and rigidly followed can make them seem a little artificial to outsiders. It’s exactly this artifice that Rental Family puts under a microscope.

Brendan Fraser plays Philip, an American actor who had some success at home once, but moved to Japan after making a successful commercial there. Several years later, Philip is once again a struggling actor living in a cramped apartment in Tokyo, missing his train to auditions time and time again. He gets a lucky break when he is asked to play the role of “sad American at a funeral” – a funeral that turns out to be staged. Enter Shinji (Takehiro Hira), the founder of a company called Rental Family.

This company offers people a service to, as Shinji puts it, cast somebody to play the role of something or someone that’s missing in their lives. “It’s just acting,” he says. Same as any other job Philip has ever done. The benefit is that he can help people in their lives directly. Stage a wedding to a young woman who’s emigrating to placate her parents. Spend time with someone lonely. Play the part of a journalist interviewing an aging movie star on behalf of his daughter.

When Philip is hired to pretend to be a young girl’s father to help her single mother get her into a prestigious school, he’s told that the girl, Mia, will not be aware he is an actor. She thinks his character ‘Kevin’ is actually her father, and she will be seeing her biological father for the first time in her life.

From that point on, Rental Family puts the relationships Philip creates with his clients in front of us through two perspectives: Philip’s own, as he starts getting closer to the people he’s working with, empathizing with their positions and trying to figure out how he can help them; and the perspective of the clients, who do not know Philip. They’re all speaking to ‘Kevin,’ or ‘John,’ or any number of names Philip affects as he takes on more gigs. Half of each of these relationships is real; the other half is buried underneath a layer of artifice.

In just about any other movie, you’d be constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop, for there to be that one big climactic moment where all of this artifice falls apart and Philip is exposed as a fraud. There’s still the feeling that this can’t possibly last – not just for Philip, but for the entire company – as the line between performance and lies starts to thin.

But for the most part, Rental Family is a movie about people being there for others in ways that nobody’s been there for them before. Playing a part in a person’s life ultimately isn’t limited to the simple designation of father, or journalist, or husband, and there are many ways in which those who carry that designation authentically don’t live up to them. There are things with which we all need help, or moments where we just need somebody to be there. Those connections are what Rental Family focuses on, and it does so with genuine heart and a gentle touch. In a cinematic landscape where the average tone can lean pretty dark, Rental Family wants to shine bright, and I felt all the better for it.

Rental Family opens in theaters on November 21.