An American actor in Tokyo struggling to find purpose lands an unusual gig: working for a Japanese "rental family" agency, playing stand-in roles for strangers. He rediscovers purpose, belonging, and the beauty of human connection. (from IMDb)

It's nice to see Brendan Fraser making movies again. As some have called it, we're living in a "Brendanassaince" with his renewed popularity - especially after he won an Oscar for Best Actor. It's funny, because although I love seeing him in 90's movies like The Mummy and Blast from the Past, I've never seen him as "Best Actor" material. But, in his upper 50's now, Brendan is becoming known for being a dramatic actor - and I couldn't be happier for him.

This year, Fraser stars in Rental Family, an "adaptation" of a 2015 Japanese anthology film. Directed by Hikari (Beef), the film centers around an American actor living in Japan who ends up working for an agency that rents out actors to play special, very specific roles in people's lives - like a father, wife, groom, friend, or even a mistress. Fraser plays Phillip Vanderploeg, this aging, lonely American actor, with charm and heart. It definitely doesn't hurt to see someone as much of a big-teddy-bear, as Fraser has become, in a role like this. The film is first and foremost a drama. It has some humor, but most of it is the chuckle kind - not really the laugh-out-loud kind (except maybe one scene). For the most part, it simmers in its own dramatic situations, and you can kind of foresee the trouble these situations are going to cause. The biggest storyline is when Phillip is hired to play a child's long lost father, named Kevin, so she can get into a strict, prestigious school. He's introduced to little Mia, and after the girl instantly rejects him, he works at trying to bond with the child. The problem begins brewing when Phillip and Mia grow attached to each other. Phillip starts finding purpose in this new relationship... despite it just being a temporary gig.

Another situation finds Phillip pretending to be a reporter, named John, who interviews a formerly-famous film star who is now elderly and struggling with dementia. The job is intended to help the star feel important again, but it ends up sparking its own set of problems as Phillip and the old man become closer friends. While the Rental Family service clearly has good intentions, as the story progresses, it becomes more and more apparent just how tricky toying with people's lives - and hearts - can be.

While the similarities may end with "forgotten actor feeling lost in Japan," I couldn't help but think of Bill Murray's Lost in Translation while watching Rental Family (a film that could have easily been PG-13, if a brief strip club scene had been omitted). Fraser's performance is less hopeless than Murray's, but the idea of finding connection and purpose while feeling completely out of place in life - literally and figuratively - is a shared theme between the two. The supporting Japanese cast is also wonderful in Rental Family. Scarlett Johansson played Murray's closest companion in Lost in Translation, but here, Fraser stays the lone American, interacting with Takehiro Hira, Shannon Mahina Gorman, and Mari Yamamoto, who are all absolutely wonderful in the film.

Honestly, in some ways, I feel like Rental Family just barely got by with the PG-13 rating. Fraser exclaims a semi-incomplete "Oh f---" early on in the film, when startled, and later says it fully during a desperate situation. There's a little bit of other language - some spoken in English, some in Japanese and shown in English subtitles, but the rest of the sensitive content is moreso sexual in nature. We see Phillip in bed with a prostitute after the act, and when her timer goes off, he laments, to which she offers to stay with him for a few more minutes (and specifies that it's free). Later, we see the two briefly in a sudsy bathtub together, sitting across from each other. Another scene shows Phillip accompanying a client to a strip club. The dancer is "fully dressed" in a provocative outfit, and when she spreads her legs, an audience member's head in the foreground blocks any apparent nudity. (The crowd cheers at what we do not see.) There's also a recurring theme that a man cheating on his wife can hire a woman from Rental Family to pretend to be the mistress in order to apologize to his wife (and one instance has the offended wife slapping the actress posing as the mistress). Finally, Phillip is hired to play a young woman's groom in a wedding so her parents can believe she married a man and moved away. We then see, after the wedding, a woman come into a hotel room where the bride and groom are and begin kissing the bride passionately -- revealing that the bride is a lesbian and is secretly eloping and running away with her. The film's themes address death, loss, love, single parenthood, adultery, loneliness, etc. It's a heavy, dramatic film, and one that definitely will be sensitive to some viewers (and it's definitely not one for the whole family).

Despite its thematic weight, Rental Family remains a beautiful, painfully human film. While I found it a bit on the heavy side for me, my wife absolutely loved it, calling it one of her new favorite movies. (It certainly doesn't hurt that it has a nice, emotional and dreamy score performed by Jonsi and Alex Somers.) Rental Family is a solid, well-acted, emotional drama that fans of Fraser or any of the cast are sure to enjoy... just make sure you bring tissues.