“Hi. I’m going to kill myself if you don’t come and get me.” It’s hard to gauge the seriousness of the threat, given that the speaker is an 11-year-old girl named Lacy (Zoe Ziegler), the delivery is simultaneously end-of-the-world apocalyptic and stunningly casual, and the time and location is a summer-camp headquarters in the middle of the night circa 1991. Still, the recipient of the call — her mom, Janet (Julianne Nicholson) — is there the next day, ready to take her daughter home.
Except Lacy has changed her mind. Her sudden departure has earned the tween some much-desired attention from her peers. Plus Mom’s boyfriend is in the car. Why is he still around? Now Lacy wants to stay. Can she please stay? People actually like her. No, Mom says with just a hint of exasperation. You’ve made your choice and you have to live with it. Besides, she adds, I’ve already convinced them to give me back part of your deposit.
Less than five minutes into Janet Planet, the debut feature from playwright Annie Baker, you already have a great sense of the relationship between these two, how currents of neediness and necessity run through their shared river, the way that tenderness and the straining of tolerance go hand in hand with maternal concern and a preadolescent’s preoccupation with how the world works (or doesn’t). A mutual character study between two family members that’s defined by outsiders who come and go, it’s completely of a piece with Baker’s justly praised stage work; if you’ve seen The Flick, Baker’s Pulitzer-winning drama about employees of an arthouse cinema, or any of her other elliptical plays, you’ll recognize the use of silence and stillness, the subtle way the spaces between sentences often say more than the sentences themselves. How she’s managed to translate her voice to the moving pictures — indeed, how the first-time director makes you feel that film is really the ideal medium for what she does best — is nothing short of revelatory. It’s the kind of minimalist, yet emotionally rich memory piece that’s so quietly attuned to people, place and the passing of time that, ironically, it makes you want to shout hosannahs from a mountaintop until you’re hoarse. (It’s now playing in New York and will open wider on June 28th.)
Loosely divided into three third-party-defined acts, along with that summer camp preamble and a coda, Janet Planet adheres to a recognizable structure even as the story itself tends to amble along, accumulating bits of background info like roadside pebbles — it’s a movie with set boundaries about a mother and a daughter who have none. Janet works as an acupuncturist out of their house in rural Western Massachusetts, having put herself through school while fulfilling her single-mom duties. Her current boyfriend, Wayne (Will Patton), seems nice enough, if a little too stoic. Lacy isn’t a fan, but that’s mostly because she wants Janet to herself. An excursion to a local mall gives the girl an opportunity to bond with Wayne’s daughter, who has a penchant for word games and silliness. Maybe he’s not so bad. Later, Wayne loses his cool when he gets a migraine and, well… goodbye, Wayne.
Right around then, the two enter the Regina Era. An old friend of Janet’s who’s been out of the loop for a while, Regina (Sophie Okonedo) is part of a local theater group dedicated to putting on “services” in the woods and, per its founder, striving to “celebrate radical, impersonal love.” (There has arguably never been a movie that captures a certain strain of New England neo-countercultural crunchiness better than this.) She needs a place to stay, so Janet lets her old pal crash. She’s a welcome presence, until she isn’t.
Soon, Avi (Elias Koteas) — the troupe’s alpha male and Regina’s ex — starts to come calling for Janet. He, too, seems fated to fade into the ether like so many past suitors. Meanwhile, Lacy sits on the sidelines, taking it all in. She’s trying to make sense of the adult world through her mom’s interactions, missteps, triumphs and false starts. Given that Janet hasn’t quite mastered every aspect of said world, you wonder what lessons this youngster is picking up. It’s a house filled with love, for sure. Yet there’s an undercurrent of uncertainty hovering over everything, as if Janet is waiting for her life to start in earnest and Lacy is unsure whether anything less than her mom’s full, undivided attention is enough to sustain her through childhood’s eventual end.
It’s a recognizable family dynamic, in other words, even if you haven’t experienced it firsthand. Yet while Janet Planet is many things, you wouldn’t call it judgemental — Baker and her two leads, one of whom is a child capable of giving a performance miraculously lacking in self-consciousness, have closely conspired together to present something without heroes or villains. Mom seems intent on exploring her options as a single woman while also being an attentive, nurturing figure, even if she wishes Lacy didn’t insist on holding her hand while she sleeps. Lacy can be possessive and passive-aggressive when she feels that boyfriends and old friends are encroaching too much on her territory, yet she’s also a kid who’s still innocent, still wide-eyed, still very much a kid. Even Wayne and Avi, both of whom give off different whiffs of dodginess, aren’t bad guys. They’re just in the way of what Lacy wishes was a one-planet orbit.
The fact that all of this is happening within an aesthetic that prizes natural sound — as in, the actual, unfettered sound of nature in Western Mass dominating the soundtrack — and conversational exchanges that halt, stall or simply trail off into dead ends, adds to the rawness of it all. Still, Baker knows how to weave in otherworldly, often poetic flourishes, as when a person’s presence one second is soon turned into an inexplicable absence the next.
There’s a signature ambiguity, or maybe it’s simply a distrust of easy, bow-tied dramatic solutions, that colors where the story ends up as well. I’ve thought for months about Janet Planet‘s ending, and how it’s left open and unresolved in a way that suggests the contours and complicated aspects of a real mother-daughter relationship rather than a fictional one. Baker has already shown a facility for crafting character studies that threaten to bump up against prosceniums, and her seemingly limitless talents now extend to doing that same thing within a screen’s frame. Only the transition creates something else entirely within her left-of-center humanistic storytelling. Everyone here has their reasons. Nobody can quite articulate them, but they’re still there. And the result of Baker lending that quality to the seventh art doesn’t suggest revolutionizing the movies so much as reclaiming them. Minor masterpieces are still masterpieces.
Michaela Coel in ‘The Christophers.’Claudette Barius/NEON
