Fantasy Life opens in theaters throughout Israel on Thursday, bringing an offbeat Jewish-American dramedy about panic, privilege and the pull of bad timing to local audiences. Matthew Shear’s debut feature follows Sam, a law school dropout undone by frequent panic attacks who loses his job as a paralegal and ends up looking after the three granddaughters of his psychiatrist, Dr. Finman.
That setup quickly turns into something messier. Sam, played by Shear, becomes fascinated with the family he is helping, including David, Dr. Finman’s globe-trotting musician son, and Dianne, David’s wife, played by Amanda Peet. Dianne is an actress who has struggled with depression, has not worked in 10 years and lives with the insulation of independent wealth, but the movie gives her something more complicated than comfort: a woman who once seemed headed for a different life and knows exactly how far she drifted from it.
The chemistry between Sam and Dianne arrives fast and inconveniently, and it is one of the film’s main engines. They open up to each other about their anxieties in a way that makes the attraction feel less like a plot turn than a symptom, the kind that exposes how lonely both of them are inside the same rarefied world. Peet has been candid while promoting the film about not having the career she thought she would when she first started in movies a couple of decades ago, a detail that gives her performance a sharper edge.
Shear’s film moves back and forth between an upper-class Brooklyn neighborhood and Martha’s Vineyard, and that geography matters because it keeps the characters in spaces that look secure even as they behave as if they are not. Judd Hirsch’s Dr. Finman, who recruits Sam to babysit, also points the story toward a harder idea: as Hirsch has put it, the character is shaped by internalized antisemitism, a line that helps explain why the film is less interested in tidy redemption than in the uneasy ways people absorb shame. Fantasy Life shares emotional DNA with the kind of intimate, character-driven filmmaking associated with Noah Baumbach, Nicole Holofcener, Lisa Cholodenko and James L. Brooks, but it stands on its own as a story about what happens when need, class and desire all arrive at once. By the time Sam and Dianne start speaking honestly to each other, the movie has already made its case: the real suspense is not whether they will act on what they feel, but what that feeling reveals about the families around them.
