DAN WEBSTER:
Whether a movie asks us to engage with a hero or an antihero, it’s important that we find something out about the characters that we can relate to—or at least find interesting. Otherwise, why would we choose to spend a couple of hours in their company?
Quentin Tarantino, for example, is a master of creating characters whose basic antisocial personalities are tempered by the intriguing things that they say and do. Take the Jules Winnfield character played by Samuel L. Jackson in Tarantino’s masterpiece Pulp Fiction. Has any movie figure ever recited biblical verses with more charismatic menace than he does?
On the opposite end of the spectrum, in more ways than one, we have Sam Stein, the protagonist of writer-director Matt Shear’s film Fantasy Life. Far from being a murderous hitman, Sam—played by director Shear himself—is a mild-mannered 30-something underachiever prone to crippling panic attacks.
A law-school dropout, despite having shown what a former classmate says was great promise, Sam now works as a paralegal. At least he did until, for reasons that go unexplained, he gets laid off.
Soon, though, he gets pointed toward a new, if unusual (not to mention improbable) job as babysitter to three young girls whose father David (played by Alessandro Nivola) is a musician and whose mother Dianne (played by Amanda Peet) is an actress who hasn’t booked a job in a decade.
This, then, is the world that Shear creates for us: Sam, who never seems perfectly comfortable with the girls, hanging around as David and Dianne—neither of whom seems overly concerned with their children—navigate their troubled relationship.
Sam is hired, you see, because David is set to embark on a months-long tour with a rock band. And Dianne, who complains about missing her former acting occupation—and yet who has lost confidence in her ability to perform—doesn’t seem capable of caring for the girls by herself. Whatever else is going for each of them individually, their marriage seems to be in trouble. And in another movie, Sam’s character would be in the middle of it.
Yet Shear’s script never really makes Sam the center of anything. He is discounted by David, who when he returns ends up not even remembering the name of the man he hired. Sam continually defers to his therapist—though that may be because the actor who overpowers Shear’s performance is the scene-stealing Judd Hirsch.
And during a stay with David and Dianne’s extended family, Sam is repeatedly the target of critical comments made by Dianne’s father (played by Bob Balaban), who is the only one in the film who seems to have enough sense to wonder why Sam was hired in the first place, much less still needed.
Shear deserves credit for gathering a cast of skilled, veteran performers, from Hirsch and Balaban, Andrea Martin, Jessica Harper and Holland Taylor. But other than being stereotypes—as the nebbish Sam is himself—they offer little to give Fantasy Life any real meaning.
The film’s single-most discomfiting scene comes when the infatuated Sam attempts to declare his affection for Dianne, as if this character would even stand a chance with someone so beyond his grasp as Dianne is. In fact, the only use Dianne ends up having for Sam comes when she lies about him as a way to strike out angrily at her husband—the lone moment in the whole film in which Sam seems to make any sort of impact, and one in which he is involved only symbolically.
In review after review, Fantasy Life is being categorized as a comedy/drama, and in some cases even as a romantic comedy. But Shear creates little that is truly comic, unless you find the lives of overprivileged people—and the inconsequential character that Shear plays—funny… or even worth your time.
As the movie plays out, you might find yourself wishing (as I did) that Jules Winnfield would enter and talk about walking through the valley of the shadow of death. Or at the very least about the joys of giving a foot massage.
For Spokane Public Radio, I’m Dan Webster.
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Movies 101 host Dan Webster is the senior film critic for Spokane Public Radio.
