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‘Fantasy Life’ Review: Amanda Peet Puts a Brave Face on an Uncomfortable Reality in Sensitive Dramedy
Matthew Shear makes an auspicious feature debut with a portrait of an actress (Amanda Peet) and her babysitter who feel as if they’re drowning.
It isn’t hyperbole to say that Amanda Peet gives the performance of a lifetime in “ Fantasy Life.” There probably shouldn’t be any confusion between the actress and the role she inhabits as Dianne, a one-time screen star now in her early fifties who stopped booking parts a decade ago when the material wasn’t up to snuff. Her luminous return in Matthew Shear ’s lightly comic drama about two people at a crossroads reminds that her fearlessness has been sorely missed as she throws any vanity out the window to play a walking tangle of anxieties, despite living quite comfortably with homes in New York and Martha’s Vineyard. Their concerns could be easily dismissed as champagne problems, given the upper class milieu and the general lack of discussion of mental health issues such as depression, but Shear, a longtime actor himself, trusts his and Peet’s performances to radiate a level of deep dissatisfaction that becomes undeniable, if mostly imperceptible to others.
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