The Gen X movie canon is well-known: Slacker, Singles, the Before trilogy, Grosse Pointe Blank, and so on. SXSW Narrative Competition feature Fantasy Life – about a nervous, 35-year old manny who falls for his 52-year old boss – is an interesting addition to the roster.
When attempted attorney Sam Stein (played by writer/director Matthew Shear) gets laid off from a paralegal gig he’s had for far too long, he ends up working as a babysitter for his psychiatrist’s grandkids, mostly as a scheme to get Sam out of the house. (Take a bow, 89-year old Judd Hirsch as the shrink and 78-year-old Andrea Martin as his wife.)
Sam first meets David (Alessandro Nivola, perfect), the kids’ father and an underemployed musician; David finds Sam harmless. When David gets the opportunity of a lifetime to tour with a big band, Sam’s role expands (and whoever decided that Warren Haynes’ Gov’t Mule was the band to use for this bit deserves some sort of prize).
Things take a turn when Sam meets mom Dianne (Peet, in her best performance in years), a once-semi-famous actress whose career has ground to a halt. She and Sam develop a bond over their mutual depression, loneliness, career issues, and love of her children; she eventually hires him for a summer on Martha’s Vineyard while David tours. When David’s mental illness takes a turn, everyone needs to figure out where to go from there.
The humor is bone-dry, and any movie that uses both Passion Fish and Lake Bell as punchlines knows exactly at whom it is aiming: Gen X moviegoers who miss Peet as a regular screen presence. (She hasn’t been on the big screen since 2015’s Sleeping With Other People.)
It’s also one of the most flagrantly, hilariously Jewish movies in recent memory – more than once I found myself thinking, “Are goys going to even get this?” You know that line the Coen Brothers slipped into the credits for A Serious Man? “No Jews were harmed in the making of this motion picture.” That could be slapped onto Fantasy Life.
Shear is also onto something smart in the age difference between Sam and Dianne (another in-joke for the olds): He may be a soft bundle of neuroses, but he’s much better at dealing with it than either Dianne or David, struggling artists who have subsumed their feelings in anxiety about work or their kids until it starts to bubble over into boozy anger or ambient despair. It’s a thoughtful debut – and oy vey, these people are a mess.
Screens again Monday, March 10 and Friday, March 14.
Fantasy Life
Narrative Feature Competition, World Premiere
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This article appears in March 7 • 2025.