Cast Brendan Fraser in your movie if you want to issue a manifesto on earnestness. It’s not that he lacks the range to do anything else (certainly, no hearts were melting over his racist attorney in Killers of the Flower Moon). But the Oscar winner has quickly become a gift to any director in search of naked emotion, accessible instantly through those wide, blue eyes rimmed with tears and turned slightly up, as in a portrait of the Virgin Mary, towards the heavens. He’s a one-man empathy machine.
Fraser’s presence is crucial to Rental Family, director Hikari’s examination of one of the many ways in which we Band-Aid our loneliness, outside the AI chatbots, Instagram feeds, and plastic tchotchkes. Japan, here, has a culturally specific practice: the employment of strangers, like Fraser’s American actor Phillip Vanderploeg, to fill the missing presences in people’s lives.
