San Diego International Film Festival 2025
After he was fired from his paralegal job, Sam takes a job babysitting his psychiatrists’ three granddaughters, and falls for their famous actress mother.
A quirky little year-long look at the hidden relationships in a families life, along with their busybody relatives, when an outsider gets brought in as the new au pair, a pretentious word for babysitter. The film is broken up into chapters by season, so make sure you have all your anti-anxiety meds, and lets get into this!
In the beginning, that is to say, Fall, we meet Sam (Matthew Shear), who is an anxious thirty-something Jew from New York, suffering from what his shrink calls ‘internalized antisemitism’, who until recently was working as a paralegal. And after getting fired and having multiple panic attacks in the bookstore, Sam does what all good Americans who can afford to have a head-shrink do – goes in for some good ol’ verbal and mental vomit to his therapist, who also happens to be a Jew, Fred (Judd Hirsch). Soon enough, Sam comes back out with an updated prescription for his meds, and a potential new job babysitting Fred’s granddaughters.
The trio of girls to babysit – Claire (Callie Santoro), Emma (Riley Vinson), and Zoe (Romy Fay) – are all actually pretty easy to get along with and take care of, if a bit mischievous on occasion. The girls father, the aging but still popular rock star dad David (Alessandro Nivola) doesn’t pay the girls near the amount of attention they deserve, seeming to regard the last hurrah of his musical career as far more important than being a dad – or a husband. When the girls mom Dianne (Amanda Peet) is around, she too seems a bit caught up in her own concerns of capturing whatever’s left of her acting career, though at least mom stays in the same city as her family and isn’t planning on gallivanting off to a whole other continent.
Now comes the spring, and Sam is still gamely taking care of three growing girls. Mom Dianne is still trying to mount a career comeback, despite the rampant ageism of Hollywood and their general opinion towards ‘has-beens’. Mom and Dad aren’t really connecting at all either, especially when Dad has plans to go overseas with his band for 2-3 whole months. And on the flip of that, after bonding over granola, a Battlestar Galactica reboot series and some botched attempts at shooting introductory videos, Sam and Dianne have found a connection with each-other.
As the heat blazes into summer, poor Sam has a panic attack while taking the girls on an outing, which of course leads to a whole lot of disapproval of Sam in general from the extended, very Jewish, elders of the family. After a sizzling connection between Sam and Dianne was finally made, only to be rejected in the saddest way possibly on the very edge of total fulfillment, Sam isn’t exactly in the best head-space right now. And when everyone takes a vacation off to the family vineyard, which yes includes Sam as he’s the grandkids au pair, Sam gets grilled, and roasted too for that matter, by a returned Dad and the other visiting family elders over his recent giant screwup. It’s amazing how jealousy can ruin so many peoples lives simultaneously. Sam ends up going back to New York, to be nerdy with his old roommates again.
Finally the seasons turn once more. Mom and Dad have come to a kind of reconciliation, now that he’s been properly subdued after drunkenly crashing his car into a historical post office, the idiot. And Sam and Dianne have run into each-other at a different Doctors office, getting together for coffee and some late-stage apologies and funds owed to Sam. The two of them have an amicable parting of the ways, and this glimpse into a slice of Sam’s Fantasy Life is over.
There’s very little to condemn the movie over, but the other side of that coin is that there’s very little to celebrate the film with, either. Other than the burgeoning romance of Mom and Sam, and the usually-funny whole family of Jewish elders who always complain about the same things, the movie doesn’t really do a whole lot of anything. A year of babysitting and unrequited lust turned into ships barely passing each-other in the night and some chagrined memories, is fine we suppose, but Moxie demands a much more rich fantasy life than that.
Reviewed by Alicia Glass