Amanda Peet is the real reason to appreciate this movie.
Amanda Peet has made a name for herself in the entertainment world with “Something’s Gotta Give” and “Your Friends & Neighbors” being fresh examples and “The Whole Ten Yards” and “Saving Silverman” being stupid messes. Her latest movie “Fantasy Life” allows her to shine with the right vulnerabilities. Now, it does tend to take detours through formulas that just come and go, but there are details worth acknowledging.
To start with, we meet Sam (Matthew Shear, also the writer/director), a Jewish paralegal, who gets fired from his firm, and admits to his psychiatrist Fred (Judd Hirsch) that he may be suffering from internal anti-semitism. There are different kinds of Jewish people, and based on their faiths, he would think certain slurs in his head and then he would have panic attacks. At this point, Fred suggests that Sam is “an anxious Jew with mild OCD.”
Here’s when Peet comes into his life.
His secretary wife Helen (Andrea Martin) suggests to Sam that he should babysit their granddaughters, while their son David (Alessandro Nivola) is at band rehearsal and his actress wife Dianne (Peet) is away. This is his first night on the job, and already he doesn’t know what to do with the youngest daughter wanting her mom and the girls wanting ice cream now. Funny, I was just thinking back to the “Misbehavers” segment of “Four Rooms,” where a night of babysitting turns into a fiery disaster. This movie just cuts to the Spring, Dianne is having a mid-life crisis as her acting career has halted.
While David is preparing to go on a music tour for the next few months, Sam continues to help out with the girls, and even hopes for a romance with her. They kiss one night, but the movie doesn’t go for the romance. It just leads to a drunken Dianne saying they’ve been sleeping together at the dinner table.
We also get Bob Balaban and Jessica Harper as Dianne’s parents-the dad being the one to dislike Sam from the minute he sees the results of his panic attacks with the girls. And he just might be the old timer with anger issues that annoy his daughter.
“Fantasy Life” isn’t always in focus when it comes to the babysitting and subplots that show up in the screenplay, but it is focused on Shear and Peet’s characters. And making his writing and directorial debut, he writes them both with emotions, humor, and honesty. And he also knows how to respectively cast Hirsch and Nivola with the right material.
There’s a moment when Dianne is mistaken by a fan for Lake Bell. It’s kind of funny, considering how some people might mistake Kathryn Hahn for Idina Menzel. Or is it mistaking Idina Menzel for Kathryn Hahn? And even if it’s supposed to be taken seriously, Sam tells her she’s better than Lake Bell. So it can work both ways.
And we see her visit with her therapist (Holland Taylor), as she shares her depression with her. You can see the tears in her eyes, as she examines how her lack of sex and lack of new movie roles have placed upon her.
A lot of the actors in “Fantasy Life” are Jewish, and the film allows them to speak with humanity, and never overexposes their religions. Sam just contributes the thoughts and couldn’t be more consistent about them. Despite what his mind is processing, this movie is anything but antisemitic.
This isn’t a perfect filmmaking debut for Shear, but because of his acting and how he chooses to present Peet’s character (and she is also a producer on this), it’s definitely worth checking out. And she is a better actress than some people may realize.
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