“Fantasy Life,” written, directed and starring Matthew Shear, has moments where it shines. Shear’s own personal story, mirrored in the character of Sam, is muddled in the telling but helped by a very gifted cast.
“Fantasy Life” originally centers on the early life crisis of Sam, a lost soul who dropped out of law school when his anxiety and depression got the better of him. Although on medication and regularly seeing a psychiatrist, he is unable even to hold down his paralegal job. His next opportunity arrives in the form of a favor to his psychiatrist who needs a babysitter for his grandchildren, ostensibly a one night only gig. David, father of Claire, Zoe and Emma, warns Sam that they will be a handful and offers him a fistful of money and a few guidelines, guidelines that prove too hard for Sam to follow. The girls are thrilled and slightly controlled chaos ensues.
The cherry on top of the cake is that the girls’ mother is Diane, a former actress, someone Sam has crushed on for years. Diane hasn’t worked in a very long time, aged out against her will, the root cause of herresent depressed state. Compounding her self-esteem issues, David’s career as a musician is finally starting to take off. Left alone with the girls, she needs help and Sam’s part time gig becomes semi-permanent. Close proximity to the object of his desire is both a source of euphoria and anxiety for him. Diane, aware of Sam’s infatuation, is flattered and does little to discourage him. She’s feeling unwanted and unattractive and will seize at anything to prop up her self-esteem, leading Sam to believe that there might actually be something between them, a delusion encouraged by the narcissism of the actress of his dreams.
It is at this point that the film veers away from Sam’s story to that of Diane and therein lies the rub. Shear, the writer, cannot decide whose story he wants to tell, thinking he can tell both stories at the same time. Sam’s narrative as an anxiety-prone “manny” confessing his love of Diane to the children is far less interesting than the midlife crisis being suffered by Diane. Her story of a woman at loose ends who seemingly has everything and feels she has nothing is a case study in depression. Sam’s narrative is extraneous and muddies the more interesting dissection of a beautiful, talented middle-aged woman in search of a direction. Her story intersects his very little, despite the fact that he is ever-present. Diane’s frustrating interactions, or lack thereof, with husband David illustrate the kind of communication lacunae many long-term marriages face and needed a bit more dissection. David is portrayed as unsympathetic and distant but he’s an active player in all of this and Shear doesn’t give this character the depth needed to play against his unhappy wife. He’s not blameless but neither is he to blame and that should have been better explored. The dynamic between Diane and, literally, everyone else is revealing. No one, not her husband, not her parents or his parents lean into understanding her, ironic because her father-in-law is a psychiatrist. Using Sam as her adoring foil is lazy. Diane’s unhappiness is the crux of the issue. She is suffering from a clinical depression that reverberates on everyone she touches or, in some cases, doesn’t. Her climactic lie at a family dinner is a high point in the film because it opens wounds that needed excavating but, in its own way, is allowed to drop into an abyss.
As mentioned earlier, Shear, the director, assembled an extraordinary cast for such a small movie. Judd Hirsch, as Sam’s psychiatrist, is warm and understanding, lending a depth to his character that wasn’t necessarily on the page. Andrea Martin, playing his wife, is wry and humorous even when just taking a phone call. As Diane’s parents, Bob Balaban and Jessica Harper are the perfect upper middle class, upper west side successful Jews, looking askance at anyone outside their economic circle. Alessandro Nivola, a leading man who has become the second lead who steals the picture (case in point, his indelible role in “The Brutalist” as the heartless brother), was given an unsympathetic role that he endowed with a striver’s mentality and anger underscored with confusion. Shear has made him a little too much the bad guy in a story that shouldn’t have one. Shear, as Sam, is the realistic embodiment of an individual whose potential will never be met because of the inherent anxieties and clinical depression that derail him at every juncture. Shear, the director and writer, was correct in assuming that Sam was a character whose story was worth telling but that’s a different movie. Sam’s storyline in this film comes at the expense of what he wants to say about Diane and her struggles.
Amanda Peet, as Diane, is amazing. She is warm, cold, dead, alive, a liar, a truth teller, a good mother, a neglectful one, recognizant that what she has is more than most and resentful she doesn’t have what she doesn’t have. She is the very embodiment of what it must feel like to be floating in the abyss of depression. Peet has long been a favorite of mine. Always a fine actress, it has surprised me that she hasn’t been more prominent. Luckily she has not yet “aged out” because roles are still coming her way, but she has never been the star she should have been.
If only for a chance to watch all of these amazing actors, including a small but indelible appearance by Holland Taylor, go see this film because there are more high notes than low. It just would have been better if Shear had realized that the more interesting story was about her not him.
Opening April 3 at the Landmark Sunset 5.
