SCREEN | Amanda Peet Babysits A 'Fantasy Life'

"I think you're an anxious Jew with mild OCD."

Greenwich Entertainment / Vortex Media

New York actor Matthew Shear writes and directs his first feature film, the amusing age-gap romantic comedy, Fantasy Life, starring himself, Amanda Peet (also a producer), and Alessandro Nivola, as a laid-off paralegal (also a law school dropout) struggling to manage his crippling anxiety who ends up babysitting the daughters of his psychiatrist's (Judd Hirsch) depressed former actress daughter-in-law with her aloof musician husband (the psychiatrist's son).

Set both in the middle of New York City during the year and summer in Cape Cod, the breezy film, full of typical Jewish-American neuroses and hang-ups, has a casual feel to the everyday problems it explores in its flighty characters. Shear cast some all-star supporting actors, like Bob Balaban, Andrea Martin, and Zosia Mamet, in small roles that nicely fill out the odd familial connections between Peet and Shear's mismatched characters.

Fantasy Life takes a serious but dryly comical approach to its East Coast metropolitan flavour of Jewishness. Shear's anxieties and feelings are expressed both sensitively and playfully mockingly as a man rapidly approaching middle age who's still treated very much like a boy thanks to his personal issues. It's a surprisingly assured debut film outing that's measured and endearing in its May–December romance between Peet and Sheer.


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