Janet Planet, the debut film from renowned playwright Annie Baker, seems to get off on how much it’s withholding from the audience. For a while, we don’t know the age of Lacy (Zoe Ziegler), our protagonist, just that she wants to escape summer camp so badly that she lies about her mom’s boyfriend dying in a car accident. When we meet her mom, the titular Janet (Julianne Nicholson), we’re not sure what it is she does in the basement of their rustic Massachusetts home, labeled Janet Planet, to pay the bills on this rather beautiful home. It’s also never announced where they are, what time period it is — the cars and washed color palette are giving 1990s vibes — and where Lacy’s father is. The film’s restraint is meant to signal some sense of mystery and hidden depths, but it’s actually a lot emptier than it thinks it is.
It’s likely that Baker, who wrote the screenplay in addition to directing, is eliding so much in order to evoke the blinkered perspective of a child, who is only privy to certain parts of conversations, and has a limited scope on the world generally. However, for one, the film doesn’t flow entirely from Lacy’s perspective; there are scenes with Janet that play out in spaces where Lacy doesn’t have access. Furthermore, the movie feels much too fussily written to credibly root itself in the vantage of someone who we come to eventually learn is about to begin middle school (the movie takes place over the course of a summer break). “Y’know what’s funny? Every moment of my life is hell,” Lacy resigns in one of several scenes that chronicle the young girl’s bedtime routine of lying side-by-side with her mom. These conversations are freighted with importance and are disastrously overwritten. These dialogues simply don’t register as real. (Later, to another character Lacy remarks that “it’s a complete mystery to [her]” why she doesn’t have any friends with more than a hint of all-knowing wisdom. It’s a funny line but similarly comes off like a self-satisfied adult writer’s conception of a kid.)
The film does get some comic mileage out of Lacy being stiltedly present for some vulnerable interactions with Regina (Sophie Okonedo), an old friend of Janet’s who comes to stay at the house for a while. It takes a beat to register that Lacy is just standing directly beside her mom gawking as the two exchange a long, emotional hug in public. And when Janet and Regina take drugs together, presumably shrooms, we think we’re witnessing a long and somewhat tense private exchange between the adults when, all of a sudden, Regina asks Lacy to fetch her mother some water, and the girl rises from out of frame. These gags don’t function as trenchant observation or motif, though. Late in the movie, Janet notes that she gets the sensation that Lacy is watching her, even when she’s not around. This is Baker outright articulating an idea of an inseparable mother-daughter pair who can’t yet shake each other, try as they might, without exploring the finer details of that.
Shot by Maria von Hausswolff — who lensed the phenomenally beautiful Godland last year — in grainy 16mm, Janet Planet is clearly going for crunchy and tactile, with its plethora of earth tones and insert shots of small, carefully observed physical actions and details. We see a close-up of a tick being flushed down the toilet and quite a few scenes with Lacy playing with some miniature figurines. The mixing of these close-proximity images with wider angle long shots points to Baker’s play with what to uncover and what to leave vague. As with the film’s narrative and thematic evasion, the visuals don’t locate the piercing truth between their poles of extremity; Janet Planet tumbles into the chasm between the broad and specific.
Photo courtesy of A24
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