‘Fantasy Life’ Review: Amanda Peet Sparkles in Matthew Shear’s Low-Key Directorial Debut

If the recent rash of older-woman-younger-man romances have had one thing in common, it’s the emphasis on the first half of that equation. Films like The Idea of You or Babygirl may not have totally ignored the male point of view, but it was purposefully deprioritized against the fantasy of female sexual awakening — the rush of discovery, the anxiety of aging, the sheer fun of hooking up with a pretty young thing.

Against that framing, the SXSW debut Fantasy Life plays, accidentally, like the flip side to that equation, with its focus on his perspective and its less starry-eyed, more downbeat tone. But if the movie does not offer the same kind of pleasure, it serves as an interesting variation on the theme, as well as a worthy discovery in its own right. With Amanda Peet in a remarkable star turn, it marks a promising debut for writer-director Matthew Shear.   

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The younger man in question is Sam, also played by Shear. Though he was once a law school student with potential, he dropped out over mental health issues and, at the start of the film, is working as a paralegal. When he loses even that job — in a wryly observed scene that doesn’t bother going past the “I hope you know how valuable you are” platitudes — he goes to see his longtime therapist (Judd Hirsch) about his panic attacks. He walks out with an updated prescription for his meds, and an unlikely new gig babysitting the man’s granddaughters.

He’s okay at it in that the girls seem to like him well enough, even if their rock star dad, David (an appropriately slimy Alessandro Nivola), regards him with a disinterest that borders on disdain. The greatest perk of the job, however, turns out to be Sam’s new proximity to their mother, a once-promising actress named Dianne (Peet) trying to mount a career comeback. The pair first strike up a conversation one night over bowls of granola and reruns of Battlestar Galactica, and while the sexual chemistry isn’t instant, the sense of ease is. Within weeks, he’s helping her with self-tapes and accompanying her to the movies. Within months, he’s accompanying the entire family to their summer home in Martha’s Vineyard, where, inevitably, his crush on Dianne intensifies into something more consequential.

Fantasy Life made me chuckle out loud only occasionally, and its drama is pitched perhaps too modestly. I left the theater with the faint sense of anticlimax, having wanted to be more moved or amused by it than I was. But when I thought back on it days later, what stood out in my mind was not so much its climactic confrontation — splashy though it is, between the screaming and the grievous bodily injury and the unwelcome input from a cadre of in-laws played by Hirsch, Andrea Martin, Bob Balaban and Jessica Harper — but the tiny, perfect details Shear sprinkles throughout.

Shear can find the punchline in a half-empty box of Yoo-hoo, collected on the way out of a disappointing romantic encounter, or the comic tension in a glass of rice pudding going untouched on a table during an awkward conversation. He maps the story’s relationships along similarly subtle beats, like the way Dianne tucks her feet under Sam almost without thinking on the couch the first time they meet.

Characterizations are likewise constructed as much out of unspoken reflexive reactions as they are out of Shear’s naturalistic dialogue. David and Dianne’s tendency to talk around his alcoholism or his selfishness toward her tells you a lot about who he is, but the way he pretends to sink a basket after Sam fails to — as if his imaginary three-pointer might be proof of his inherent superiority — speaks volumes more.

That focus on the small things dovetails with the mindsets of the two leads, who seem hopelessly unable to get out of their own heads. Sam suffers from intrusive thoughts that he theorizes stem from intergenerational trauma or internalized antisemitism, and that his doctor breezily attributes to his being “a Jew with mild OCD.” (Sam, incredulously: “Mild?”) Dianne struggles with a depression that feeds off of and into her unhappiness in her marriage and her anxieties about her career. Both seem to walk through the world feeling overly exposed to its disappointments, and it tracks that both would find in their dynamic a respite from the insecurities that haunt them day in and day out.

Shear acquits himself well with Sam’s starstruck regard of this famous and beautiful creature who’s inexplicably taken an interest in him, and then with his gloom when things go sour. But the performance of the film is really Peet’s. Hers is a fearless turn confronting head-on the everyday mortifications of aging out of showbiz (in one incident, she’s approached by a fan who turns out to have mistaken her for Lake Bell), the roiling mix of emotions under Dianne’s casually glamorous surface, the toxicity of her need and her unwillingness to acknowledge it.

In a bravura sequence toward the end of the film, she confesses to a therapist (Holland Taylor) that she can’t stand listening to herself complain. “I’m a wealthy white woman who made six figures from my dad’s business, like Donald Trump, and I pretty much always feel like a victim,” she explains. In her mind, such privileges make her undeserving of care. Which, we understand, makes her more inclined to seek it out from people like Sam, who revere her so much they’ll serve it to her without being asked.

It’s a heartbreaking admission, made all the more resonant by the rawness with which Peet delivers it, and it’s one of the few moments in the movie that pierced me right then and there on the spot. Maybe, then, Fantasy Life is a heroine’s picture after all — just one that eventually becomes clear-eyed enough to see her for the deeply flawed person she is, and grounded enough to reckon with the rubble she leaves in her wake.