Directed and written by: Annie Baker.
Starring: Julianne Nicholson, Zoe Ziegler and Will Patton.
Runtime: 113 minutes.
Pulitzer-winning playwright Annie Baker’s ‘Janet Planet’ a meditative memory of childhood
“I’m going to kill myself.”
The opening moments of “Janet Planet” are suffused with dread. A girl alone at night, held in a static shot, announces her intention to end her life to an unseen, unheard person on the phone. She’s small and awkward, this bespectacled ginger girl who wants to die. After a long, pregnant beat, the girl adds, “I said I’m going to kill myself if you don’t come get me.”
A held breath then a sigh of tentative relief, that uncertainty of whether to feel amusement or alarm, captures the horror and humor of encroaching adolescence in debut filmmaker and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Annie Baker’s beautiful, bittersweet “Janet Planet.” Baker’s meditative vignette of early 1990s girlhood is a different, more truthful kind of coming-of-age tale that moves at the pace of life, full of terrible waiting.
That death-desiring girl in the film’s opening scene (at summer camp, it turns out) is Lacy (Zoe Ziegler), the by-turns tender and feral 11-year-old daughter of single mother Janet (Julianne Nicholson), a free-spirited acupuncturist bouncing between boyfriends and oddball pursuits in the woods of western Massachusetts. “Janet Planet” occupies the summer before sixth grade, that middle-school cusp in which the simplicity of childhood begins to yield to the complications and mess of more adult responsibilities and desires.
Lacy is an odd duck. She complains she doesn’t make friends easily. She plays an electric keyboard, poorly. In the shower, she sticks wet clumps of her hair to dry on the tile. She sleeps at night in bed with her mother and can only fall asleep if they’re touching, her hands cupping her freckled face in the dark. With her big eyes, made bigger by her round gold glasses, Lacy observes the outcasts who orbit luminous Janet like satellites: bad boyfriends, would-be cult leaders, down-on-their-luck friends.
There is her mother’s boyfriend Wayne (Will Patton), a sharp-tongued ogre with migraines and little love for Lacy. Then there is Regina (Sophie Okonedo), an actress friend with nowhere else to go after she leaves what might be a cult. And then there is the would-be cult leader himself, Avi (Elias Koteas), who professes his captivation with Janet. These misfits move in and out of Janet’s life, in and out of her home, as wide-eyed Lacy takes it all in for us.
Lacy (and the camera) loves Janet in all her frustrating, glorious imperfection. “I’ve always had this knowledge deep inside of me that I could make any man fall in love with me if I really tried,” Janet says. “And I think maybe it’s ruined my life.” Nicholson gives an alluring, earthy performance. Her Janet never settles, yearns for something she can’t find; she won’t apologize for the search, however messy it is.
“Janet Planet” commands a certain patience. Like the summer it inhabits, it moves with a sun-struck slowness, lingering on the mundane. It feels the way it feels to remember how your mom smelled, how her earrings glittered in the sunlight, how her voice sounded over the ambient hum of cicadas.
The film quickly trains you to stop bracing for dramatic turns. Will Janet’s ex-boyfriend break into the house? Will the toaster oven left unattended burn it down? Those are questions for a more conventional movie. In “Janet Planet,” as in real life, nothing much happens. And like real life, that emptiness can be frustrating until you look back and realize the days weren’t so empty after all, that every day meant so much.
Barbara’s ranking
3/4 stars
