Will the ‘Brenaissance’ Ever Let Brendan Fraser Be Funny Again?
Starring in the 1992 frozen caveman comedy Encino Man weirdly proved to be a major advantage at the 2023 Academy Awards. First Ke Huy Quan won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his work in Everything Everywhere All At Once. And later, Brendan Fraser took home the Best Actor prize for the controversial (and unfortunately titled) The Whale.
This was seemingly the high point of the “Brenaissance,” Fraser’s Hollywood comeback, which followed his prolonged hiatus from show business (the actor stated that an alleged sexual assault by the former head of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association caused him to “retreat” and “feel reclusive”).
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After the Best Actor win, Fraser landed a supporting role in Martin Scorsese’s harrowing epic Killers of the Flower Moon. And now he’s earning Oscar buzz yet again with the new dramedy Rental Family, which just premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival.
The movie tells the story of a struggling American actor living in Japan (played by Fraser) who lands a job at a “rental family” company, where he pretends to be important figures in the lives of strangers, from grooms to absentee fathers.
The movie has got some major problems, perhaps the biggest being that no parent in their right mind would let a child spend countless hours with a stranger just because they’ve been hired to be their fake dad. And this is one of the key emotional throughlines of Rental Family. Sure, there are real “rent-a-family” companies, but they surely don’t involve leaving kids alone with unvetted randos. And if they do, that’s not great.
The movie’s strained attempts to warm your heart may or may not work depending on if you can get over the arguably creepy-as-hell premise. That being said, Fraser is still very watchable, and the moments that work are the ones in which he actually gets to be funny, such as an early scene in which he’s hired to play a funeral attendee.
Which does make me wonder if this new phase of Fraser’s career will ever allow for more comedies.
While he obviously appeared in a number of dramas early in his career, as we’ve mentioned before, Fraser excelled at playing a flesh-and-blood cartoon character in movies like George of the Jungle and Looney Tunes: Back in Action. And he also fit well into slightly more grounded comedic scenarios like Blast From the Past and The Scout.
Fraser, it seems, already has some more dramatic work lined up, including the upcoming “D-Day movie Pressure,” in which he will play Dwight D. Eisenhower. But Fraser will be stretching his comedic muscles again, just not in live-action. He’s lending his voice to the Tubi adult animated comedy series Breaking Bear, which has been described as a cross between Yogi Bear and The Sopranos.
And fingers crossed that Fraser will dust off his loin cloth for the rumored sequel to Encino Man everyone has been waiting for.
