Illustration by Michael DiMilo
Summer Time: Film Review of Janet Planet
★★★★☆
By Geoff Carter
We are all familiar with the way that plotlines of traditional mysteries, romances, horror flicks, and comedies play out, but movies that eschew these narrative parameters convey a completely different sort of cinematic experience. When based on subjective impressions and sensations, these sorts of anti-narrative films condense or expand time as a function of the subjective experience of their characters. In other words, they create a film based on a character’s inner self, sometimes transcending time and bending space.
Examples of this type of film are David Lowery’s haunting A Ghost Story or to a lesser degree, Diana O. Pusic’s black comedy Tuesday. Both movies externalize the inner life of the protagonist and, as a result, create a sense of timelessness. Another example is Janet Planet, renowned playwright Annie Baker’s first film.
The movie, set very specifically in 1991, centers on the relationship between 11-year-old Lacy (Zoe Ziegler) and her mother Janet (Julianne Nicholson), but it is hardly a typical coming-of-age film. The two of them—along with Janet’s assorted friends and boyfriends—are spending the summer in beautiful rural Massachusetts. Baker does a masterful job of capturing impressions of summer: the stickiness, the heat, the light, the balmy nights, and the slow languorous days are captured in this wonderfully structured (or understructured) film. You can almost feel a sticky popsicle melting on your hand.
Janet Planet is very much of an impressionistic piece using fleeting glances, pregnant pauses, and long static shots to create Lacy’s world. We see the world through her eyes, filled with her omnipresent, but somewhat detached mother, and with glimpses of bits and pieces of adult existence seen through stair railings and heard through partially opened doors. Whether Lacy is walking to her piano lesson, listening to her mother and her friend Regina (Sophie Okonedo) discuss the meaning of life on a very stoned evening, the mystery of that adult world is revealed to the girl in only small barely decipherable slices.
Lacy, as 11-year-olds do, is trying to figure out who she is; the beauty of Janet Planet is that the film slowly reveals that her mother is also trying to figure out who she is, too, revelations that are usually seen through the prism of adult relationships from which Lacy only gleans vague meanings. Janet Planet is loosely structured through a series of chapters, each one named for one of Janet’s friends as they enter her life and another proclaiming their exits from Zoe and Janet’s life.
The film opens as Lacy is calling her mother from summer camp, telling her she’s going to kill herself if she can’t go home. Janet picks her up the next day. Lacy is disappointed to see that her mother’s boyfriend, the taciturn Wayne (Will Patton) who doesn’t seem to want her around. Lacy spends her time at home practicing piano and playing with a number of clay puppet figures on a homemade puppet stage set up in her bedroom. After putting them to bed, playing with them, Lacy typically closes the curtain on them.
One day they go to meet Wayne’s daughter Sequoia (Edie Moon Kearns). While Wayne finds it hard to communicate with his own daughter, she and Lacy get on like a house afire. One tracking shot follows the two of them racing through a mall. It is a beautiful demonstrating the timeless quality of childhood joy. One evening, Wayne is stricken with a migraine. Janet tends to him, waking Lacy, who tries to speak to him. After his harsh response, Wayne is suddenly out of the picture—announced by the Wayne’s Exit sign.
Janet and Lacy go to a local commune to witness an outside play featuring oversize puppets. Janet meets Regina and the two engage in a long conversation. A long shot shows the two in conversation while Lacy sits huddled in a corner watching them intently. The scene communicates beautifully both the girl’s isolation and her curiosity. Caught in the merry-go-round of her mother’s relationships, Lacy finds herself a peripheral presence in the orbit of her mother.
Regina stays with them a while. One night, she and Janet get high and have a lengthy discussion about their lives, their dreams, their disappointments, and their ambitions. The scene goes on for some time. Lacy is nowhere to be seen until she suddenly appears. Apparently, she had been there the whole time, as invisible to the audience as she was to her mother.
Baker’s use of off-screen space reinforces both Lacy’s isolation and her connection to her mother. Sometimes she is only half in the frame, as if she intuits that she is only on the periphery of her mother’s consciousness. When her mother goes to a square dance, Lacy sits on the side, intently watching her mother twirling and sashaying with dozens of others.
Lacy’s mother uses the name Janet Planet for her acupuncture practice, but on another level speaks to the power she has to pull people into her orbit. During one scene when she and Lacy are lying in bed together, she says that she always felt she could make any man fall in love with her, a talent she first considered a gift, and then later a curse. Like Lacy, Janet does not really know who she is and what do with the people who enter and leave her orbit unexpectedly.
Janet Planet is a film of slow-motion and patient self-discovery. Time seems suspended for this mother and daughter in the summer of 1991. The summer—as summers do in childhood—seems to stretch on forever, but these summers can be as torturous as they are pleasant. The structure of school and the presence of friends and the comfort of routine are gone. All a child is left with is herself—and her mother.
Baker captures these concurrent feelings of loneliness, boredom, and confusion as deftly as a child catching a butterfly. Her use of long static shots, sometimes minimal dialogue, and classical background music creates a seemingly pastoral atmosphere punctuated with an undercurrent of tension and anticipation. Janet and Lacy are in a world that is waiting to happen.
Zoe Ziegler’s Lacy is a brilliantly precocious performance. Her Lacy is curious, petulant, patient, resistant, and defiant by turns. She is not a happy child, but she is a survivor, as in Julianne Nicholson’s Janet. Like Lacy, she is unsure and unhappy, but also self-contained and—well, magnetic. Nicholson’s performance captures all these qualities with the subtlest of expressions and gestures. It is a masterful performance.
Janet Planet is not a typical coming-of-age film. It is, in fact, one of those movies that sticks with you for a good while after coming out of the theater. It resonates. It is haunting. It explores those mysteries of identity that are never resolved, no matter how old we are. It is timeless.