A romcom with little romance and less comedy

Hi,

There are two films at the Ross right now: A documentary about musician Billy Preston, which is playing for a second week; and Fantasy Life, a romantic comedy drama film from writer/director/actor Matthew Shear.

I saw Fantasy Life. It sucked!

But first, here's everything else that's coming soon:

• Resurrection, a one-night only screening on Wednesday, April 15.
• Immediate Family, which opens Friday, April 17.
• Mr Nobody Against Putin, the Oscar-winning documentary, which opens Friday, April 17.
• Challengers, a one-night free screening on Tuesday, April 21, presented by the UNL Film Club.
• I Swear, which opens Friday, April 24.
• Nika & Madison, which opens Friday, April 24.
• The Art of Dissent, a one-night screening on Saturday, April 25

Now Playing: Fantasy Life

Do you like a good poop joke? Well, I have bad news. Fantasy Life has two (in a five-minute span) and both are terrible.

That's kind of a petty complaint, so here's a more substantial critique: Fantasy Life is a character study, but at no point did I care about the characters involved.

The story follows Sam (played by writer/director Matthew Shear), an anxious law school dropout, who accepts a job babysitting his psychiatrist's grandchildren. This is an objectively terrible decision, but Sam's personal and professional life is already sitting somewhere just north of rock bottom so what the hell. In the film's opening few minutes, he loses his dead-end job as a paralegal; suffers a humiliating panic attack in a bookstore; faints in the bookstore; and confesses to his shrink that he's been struggling with "internalized antisemitism" (e.g., when he sees someone who is visibly Jewish, he starts repeating slurs in his head). He's also single, which is not a character flaw, though others certainly treat it as one. Given all this, Sam's bad choices (working as his psychiatrist's sitter is not the only one) start to at least make sense. I didn't like him very much, but he was a believable loser.

Sam quickly develops a crush on Dianne (played by Amanda Peet), a washed-up film actress and — more consequentially — the mother of the three kids he's babysitting. It's clear that Dianne reciprocates Sam's affection to some extent, though the film leaves it somewhat ambiguous whether she actually likes him or the idea of his adoration. Dianne clearly misses the Hollywood spotlight and — apart from her will-they-won't-they flirtation with Sam — her character arc revolves around a halfhearted attempt to break back into the industry after a decade of irrelevance. In one of the movie's best scenes, Sam helps Dianne film an audition tape for a prospective science fiction flick; the script is wooden and goofy, but the back-and-forth shows the two do have some chemistry. (Frankly, I would rather have seen the trashy sci-fi film, bad script and all.)

Unfortunately, the good moments are fleeting. Other, worse scenes stretch on endlessly, and many of the sequences featuring Dianne's extended family — including her husband David, his parents, and her parents — are excruciating. Even worse are the important narrative beats that the filmmakers, for some reason, decided to place off-screen. It might have been nice, for example, to witness Sam and Dianne's first encounter. In a moment of absolute pandemonium during Sam's first night babysitting, he grabs the phone to call her for help. (At this point, he's only met David.) But just as she picks up — hard cut to black and a months-long time skip, and when the story resumes, Sam has been promoted to full-time nanny. Eliding their meet cute was obviously an intentional artistic choice, but Shear's reason for trying to subvert genre expectations remains mysterious to me.

In the end, Sam's infatuation with Dianne doesn't seem to go anywhere (and also ends off-screen). I suppose it's fitting because Sam also goes nowhere in particular. At least, we never see him go anywhere, emotionally speaking. Fantasy Life, despite several scenes that feature psychiatric counseling sessions, seems afraid to get inside his head. While I don't demand that characters always "grow" or "learn a lesson" or anything so didactic, it would've been nice to get a glimpse of a character arc, some hint of what his almost-fling with a married woman means to him.

Presumably, all that happens off-screen too.

For fun, here's a few other things that annoyed me:

• Several characters exist entirely for expository purposes, like Sam's former law school classmate who appears midway through the film to tell Sam (and the audience) about how Sam dropped out. She then vanishes from the script. Lots of stories have minor characters who are there to perform one specific action, but better films are more subtle about it.
• The film is pretty clear about the fact that Sam shouldn't be taking care of kids. But the focus is less on his terrible judgement and more on his diagnosed mental illness. Other characters, and eventually Sam himself, conclude that his semi-regular panic attacks mean he shouldn't be a nanny. And you know what fair enough. But David, the kids' father, spends the narrative struggling with alcoholism and the film never casts judgement on his ability to parent. It just felt like a weird, inconsistent standard.
• There's a bad joke about trans people. In context, it's meant to poke fun at Dianne's conservative father; but like the scatological humor, it completely fails to land. If your satirical bigotry is indistinguishable from reality, what's the point?

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~ Ty