A new movie by first-time Jewish-American director Matthew Shear, Fantasy Life, is an offbeat, very funny film, a kind of psychologically astute rom-com, that puts neurotic New Yorkers front and center for the first time in a while.
Fantasy Life, which opens in New York on March 27 and in theaters around America on April 3, won the Audience Award and the Special Jury Award for Performance for Amanda Peet at the SXSW Film Festival. It also won the Best Ensemble Cast award at the San Diego International Film Festival, had its Israeli premiere at the Haifa International Film Festival in October, and will likely be released theatrically in Israel during the coming year.
Until now, Shear has had a career as an actor, appearing in the series The Alienist and several films by Noah Baumbach: Mistress America, While We’re Young, The Meyerowitz Stories, and Marriage Story.
In addition to directing Fantasy Life, he wrote the screenplay and stars as Sam, a law-school dropout crippled by his frequent panic attacks, who loses his job as a paralegal and gets hired as the babysitter for his psychiatrist’s three granddaughters.
Before you can ask what could possibly go wrong, he meets their mother, Dianne, played by Peet. Dianne is an actress struggling with depression who once had a promising career but hasn’t worked in 10 years.
There is instant and very inconvenient chemistry between them, as these kindred spirits finally open up about their anxieties to each other.
This is one of the best screen roles Peet has had. She’s a luminous beauty whose breakout role was in the 2000 Bruce Willis comedy, The Whole Nine Yards. Her other movie roles include Something’s Gotta Give, Please Give, and 2012.
She has also appeared in the television series The Good Wife, Your Friends & Neighbors, Dirty John: The Betty Broderick Story, and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. Recently, she branched out into playwriting and created the Netflix series The Chair.
Earlier this week, a moving essay she wrote was published in The New Yorker, about how she battled a breast cancer diagnosis during the year that both of her parents died.
Treating 'internalized antisemitism'
In addition to Shear and Peet, Fantasy Life features a great cast, including Judd Hirsch (Taxi, Ordinary People), who plays the psychiatrist who attempts to treat Sam’s “internalized antisemitism.”
Alessandro Nivola, who was recently seen in The Brutalist, portrays Dianne’s husband, a successful musician who is frequently on tour. Zosia Mamet (Girls), Andrea Martin (My Big Fat Greek Wedding), Holland Taylor (Two and a Half Men), and Bob Balaban (Seinfeld, Capote) also appear in the film in small roles.
Shear and Peet sat down for a Zoom interview last week to talk about Fantasy Life and how their real lives intersect with the characters they play. Told that the panic-attack aspect of the story felt very real, Shear, 41, said, “I’m glad to hear that. Yes, it is quite autobiographical. I would say the foundation of the whole story is autobiographical. There are definitely creative turns in it, and some of the relationships and characters are conglomerates of people.
“There are things that didn’t happen one way or another, but in terms of the mental health aspects, that is a reflection of my experience, to a certain degree… And it is also true that I was a male babysitter for wealthy New Yorkers for a good chunk of time. So I had that feeling of being in somebody else’s house, where there was that kind of weird intimacy, but you’re an employee.”
PEET, 54, said that she also embraced the role of a struggling actress and didn’t mind any comparisons to her own career: “Oh no, I loved it. When somebody says, ‘She had a moment in the ’90s and then…’ I was like, wow. This is me to a tee.”
I asked Shear whether he created the character with Peet in mind. “No, I didn’t. I didn’t write it with any actor in mind,” he said. “It was, in a way, a part of myself that I found some access to, and also some other women in my life.
“When Amanda came up as an idea, everybody on the film team was like, ‘Oh my God, this is perfect, and she could really do something with this.’ So, when Amanda thankfully came on, we did start to collaborate on the character and refine it and sort of give it more specificity in relation to Amanda. Amanda’s a great writer and gave good notes too, so that improved other aspects of the script as well.”
Both Shear and Peet have had long careers as actors but have chosen to move behind the camera, writing and creating various projects. I wondered whether they planned to continue this.
“I think that it’s very liberating not to be only waiting by the phone for your agent,” Peet said. “I think Matthew and I share that feeling of not wanting to feel like a supplicant. Also, I’m not going to walk around my living room and perform scenes, but I can write anywhere.
“That was mind-blowing, that change of being busy with writing in between these phone calls, whenever they may be, if I was lucky enough to get them. That was a big deal.”
Shear responded, “Yeah, Amanda, you said it so well. That is exactly how I feel about it. I think we both agree that the experience of writing and bringing something to life is unlike anything else, and it’s not the same as acting, even when you have a great part. It’s something completely different.”
Peet laughed, saying that when she was the writer/showrunner on The Chair, a series about academia, “How liberating it is to show up in snow pants with dirty hair – that was so deeply satisfying. Sandra Oh and Nana Mensah [two of the stars of the show] would have been in hair and makeup for an hour and a half, and I was just rolling in, right at crew call.
“Women have to go [for hair and makeup] so early, and it was really powerful, and something I wanted my daughters to see, to be able to come in later. If I were Cate Blanchett or Julia Roberts, I would be on the receiving end of really great writing all the time. It would just be like, which one should I pick? But for me – and I think Matthew and I have talked about this – it’s really great to be able to generate your own work and not be waiting.”
Turning back to their collaboration on Fantasy Life, I asked them if they saw the bittersweet movie as a love story.
Peet said, “For me, it is. I think Matthew probably knows that, in the back of my mind, I felt like it had to be kind of a love story. Whether they could change the iteration of their relationship and go there wasn’t the question. The question was: Is this a love story? Yes, 100 percent.”
Once again, they were on the same page. “Yeah, I would also agree with you that it is a love story,” said Shear. “I think what’s maybe different about it is that it leaves you with a kind of non-dramatic heartbreak that is private and becomes part of your everyday life. In that sense, it’s a love story, but it ends in a way that’s less sort of pat.”
Fantasy Life is anything but pat, and although I enjoyed the movie when I saw it in Haifa, I found it even funnier and more interesting when I re-watched it on a computer link to prepare for the interview. It was diverting amid this war, which is probably the best compliment I can give it.