‘Fantasy Life’ review: Amanda Peet, back on the big screen, is better than ever

Sometimes it takes a whole movie to get to a wonderful last line. But for that last line to truly be wonderful, the whole movie before it has a job to do. So it’s a pleasure to report that actor-turned-filmmaker Matthew Shear, with his debut feature “Fantasy Life,” shows a facility for finessing a meal that lands the last bite. A modest yet amusingly spiky round trip from Manhattan to Martha’s Vineyard, it has the trappings of a rom-com but a trickier soulfulness about its unlikely connection.

Shear, with a resting face that seems halfway to panic attack, plays Sam, whose free-floating anxiety is enough to make him faint in public after getting laid off. He also gets squeamish confessing his darkest self-hating thoughts to his avuncular, heard-it-all psychoanalyst (a perfect Judd Hirsch). When an offer from his shrink’s wife (Andrea Martin) to babysit their three granddaughters elicits an impulsive yes — “We know your parents,” she says cheerily to Sam, pushing aside any nagging ethical quandaries — Sam finds himself in the fancy brownstone of successful musician David (Alessandra Nivola) and withdrawn, out-of-work actor Dianne (Amanda Peet).

Before long, an ill-suited rebound gig for quick cash turns into full-time manny-ing, but also a growing affection between Sam and Dianne as fellow depressives who recognize in each other a kindred, semi-broken spirit of past promise and present unease. Sam’s a 30-something law school dropout reduced to a position he knows he’s inherently ill-suited for. Dianne, a onetime star with a flatlined career and on the wrong side of 50, toggles between worrying she’ll never act again and ambivalence about even trying. It’s a medicated but functioning limbo that Peet, in one of her best roles, conveys without the slightest trace of pity but with a coursing, wryly emotional intelligence that always reveals the sadness fueling it.

In setting up this will-they-won’t-they-ness, which comes to a head over a Vineyard summer, Shear’s pacing is a bit too laconic and hesitant, as if worried he’ll fall into comic clichés of neurosis and depression mined so frequently in the Jewish humor canon. (Clichés that, in fact, were upended hilariously in a movie Shear appeared in: Nathan Silver’s terrific “Between the Temples.”)

But once all the players are in the same space — husband back from a tour, in-laws in force, including Dianne’s wealthy folks (Jessica Harper and a hilariously judgmental Bob Balaban) — Shear rolls out an intergenerational family dinner scene of accusations, alcohol, revelations and crack comic timing that justifies his ticking-time-bomb methods and god-tier supporting cast. Nivola, in a particularly tough role, displays a heady mix of alpha machismo, tenderness and contempt that is just as funny as it needs to be without losing a crucial dimensionality.

That Shear knows how to bring the storyline’s seasonal time frame to a cyclical close with humor, warmth and hope is the grace note that makes “Fantasy Life” feel like the start of a promising writing-directing career. Shear and Peet’s wonderfully calibrated work together reminds us that we often (should) watch movies to meet others, to assume things and be disabused, to wish and worry in between laughs and sometimes to come out of it with a satisfying incompleteness. In fact, that last line (technically the second to last, which I won’t spoil) isn’t even some wit grenade. It’s a statement of feeling, born of crazy experience that, in these grim times for honest comedies about life, could become a storytelling manifesto.