Annie Baker’s coming-of-age film features a career-best performance from Julianne Nicholson as a crunchy single mom living in Western Massachusetts.
Lacy (Zoe Ziegler) likes to put her hands around her mother’s head at night, as though she’s trying not just to keep her close but to reach into her mind and get a sense of what she’s thinking. When the pair are first shown sharing a bed, a habit Janet (Julianne Nicholson) has started to worry is getting weird, Janet lies on her back while her 11-year-old stares directly at her from the side, their faces converging in Persona-esque riff. But any hopes for a parent-child meld are strictly one-sided. Janet is an acupuncturist, a single parent, and a source of endless mystery and frustration for her daughter, who would be content for the two of them to exist as a self-contained dyad in the airy cabin they share. Unfortunately for Lacy, Janet is a seeker, prone to opening their home to a revolving cast of friends and lovers who come to stay, though never for long. The year is 1991, but in the slice of Western Massachusetts where Janet Planet takes place, the ’60s never entirely faded, and Janet is a wistful child of that era. She has an earthy, receptive energy that proves to be irresistible to everyone, including her own daughter.
Janet Planet, which was written and directed by playwright Annie Baker in her film debut, grows on you. The first time I saw it, I enjoyed but didn’t feel particularly moved by the ways its young main character, who contrives to come back early from camp, spends the summer as a kind of tourist in her own home — a visitor to the realm of her mother’s grown-up life. But when I came back to the film months later, the intricacy of its emotional undercurrents bowled me over, as though I just needed to know what was coming to fully appreciate what Baker was up to. Lacy is jealous of the demands on her mother’s attention and sometimes wages subtle warfare against the interlopers in their house by, say, using their shampoo. But more often she is a quiet observer, aware that she’s getting a chance to greedily take in sides of her parent she hasn’t otherwise gotten to see. At night, she crawls up the staircase to peek at Janet and her boyfriend Wayne (Will Patton) asleep in bed together in a tangle of middle-aged limbs. A scene in which Janet gets high with Regina (Sophie Okonedo), an old friend seeking refuge from the experimental-theater commune she’s been living in, gets a laugh out of how long it takes to reveal that Lacy’s been in the room the whole time, just out of frame.
Lacy’s inchoate yearnings to have Janet to herself are half a child’s desire for her mom and half a tween’s anxiety about the future. Middle school may be looming, but Lacy is still very much a kid in her drooping T-shirts and wire-rimmed glasses. Ziegler, a first-time actor, has a solemn resting face that gives her the aura, touchingly, of a baby owl. Aside from a few flashes of precociousness that serve as the movie’s only discordant notes (like the time she informs her mother that “My life is hell”), Lacy is an earnest and stubbornly unadorable presence. She’s tentative about making friends, but also never seems lonely, because she’s still living half in her own head. In her room, she regularly feeds and pours drinks for a row of figurines she’s set up in a bookshelf behind their own curtain, arrayed like the cast of a miniature play preparing to take a curtain call. Ziegler is a perfect counterpoint to a career-best Nicholson as a woman whose openness to the world seems to only invite potential disaster. We get a real sense of that when Janet briefly takes up with Avi (Elias Koteas), who spouts vague Buddhist philosophy and runs the theater group Regina leaves — one Janet worryingly sums up by saying “I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a cult.” Janet isn’t going to run off to a farm with Avi and his followers, but you can see her trying it out in her head anyway, wondering if this is what she’s been looking for.
Janet’s an idealist, but she’s not a fool. Nicholson gives her an elusive presence, with sky-blue eyes that may look distant but are capable of snapping to attention when someone missteps. And when, one by one, the three passers-through do eventually wear out their welcomes, Janet appears suddenly exhausted, as though all the potential for what could have been has abruptly collapsed. Janet Planet may unfold from Lacy’s perspective, but Janet is its subject and the enigma at its center — a woman waiting for whatever person or idea she hopes will complete her, and the aching opposite of her child, who would prefer the two of them seal themselves off in their rural idyll. Baker has cited Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives as one of her influences, though while the films share a syrupy dreaminess scored by a soundtrack of buzzing insects and chirping birds, Janet Planet keeps both feet planted in the real world. In that way, it’s just like Janet, gazing outward and upward, in search of mysticism and transcendence she has yet to find.
