Janet Planet is a journey to a rural Western Massachusetts world of affectation, all twee decorations, eccentric knick-knacks, self-conscious silences and pauses, and torpid nostalgic drama. The directorial debut of Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Annie Baker, the film—showing at this year’s New York Film Festival—operates in a single, precious sub-Kelly Reichardt register, its every second marked by studied images, sounds, and performances. Gently quirky to the point of exasperation, it gazes daintily at yesteryear, yet the only past it makes one pine for are the two hours prior to its commencement.
Late at night at sleepaway camp, adolescent Lacy (Zoe Ziegler) sneaks out of her bunk to a payphone to call her mother Janet (Julianne Nicholson), announcing, “I’m going to kill myself…if you don’t come get me.” This is brazen manipulation and Janet knows it, but she complies and picks up her daughter, telling her “This is a bad pattern.” Upon seeing that her mom has arrived with her latest boyfriend Wayne (Will Patton), a stoic and unfriendly creep, Lacy considers, albeit to no avail. The remainder of her summer break will now be spent at her woodlands home, attending piano lessons at an older neighbor’s house, going for walks with her mom, and carefully arranging and staring at the many figurines—now including a Troll doll given to her by a camp friend—that she’s positioned on a bookshelf that’s been retrofitted to resemble a stage, replete with opening and closing curtains.
There isn’t much momentous action in Janet Planet; Baker casts her premiere feature as a languorous memory piece that’s heavy on early ’90s atmosphere. Be it Lacy sitting on a couch playing a keyboard on her lap while a fan rotates on a side table, or the girl and her mother strolling down the area’s tree-lined roads, the mood is quiet and precise in a deliberately mannered style. Baker’s compositions often position Lacy at the bottom of the frame to highlight her low-to-the-ground perspective, and they also assume her obstructed POV as she stares at adults through windows and around corners and car seats. Everything is perfectly poised and arranged in italicized fashion, and so too are its many audio elements, from the clickety-clack of a cassette tape popping into a car deck and the incessantly chirping and buzzing insects outside the characters’ abode, to the twinkly tunes of a puppet master-themed music box that’s ultimately recalled, thematically speaking, by a late poem read to Janet on a romantic picnic.
Baker habitually cuts to sights—a teacup ride at the mall; a tick being burned by a match and flushed down the toilet; a reversible Little Red Riding Hood doll—that are meant to evoke a very particular sense of time and place. Such gestures, however, have a look-at-me sort of delicacy. Her dialogue is even more stilted, with characters generally speaking no more than one sentence at a time (and slowly), and responses arriving multiple seconds later. The effect of this halting conversational cadence is to make everyone seem like they’re thinking (and feeling!) really, really hard about what they want to say, although nothing of substance or interest comes out of their mouths, turning every exchange into an exercise in teeth-gritting patience.
When not sleeping with Janet, cradling her head with the clingy weirdness of a child unreasonably tethered to her parent, Lacy does very little, and Janet, who runs an acupuncture business out of their house, doesn’t do much more. Janet Planet is dramatically simple but its real problem is pretentiousness, and the only person who emerges (relatively) unscathed is Ziegler, who radiates believable confusion, curiosity and concern over her station in life. Baker splits her tale into chapters that have to do with the people who glide in and out of the duo’s life, starting with Wayne and followed by Janet’s old friend Regina (Sophie Okonedo)—whom she hasn’t seen in years and reconnects with at a hippie-dippy children’s costume performance at a farm—and, afterwards, Regina’s cult-leader ex Avi (Elias Koteas). That structure, epitomized by title cards announcing their beginning and end, is another in an unyielding series of cutesy flourishes that call attention to the director’s hand.
Nicholson is luminous as Janet despite Janet Planet leaving her intentionally opaque. Her protagonist comes across as a woman in search of herself, direction, and fulfillment, and consequently, Lacy’s tale is one of trying to understand life and herself through the prism of a beloved mother who’s similarly searching for answers. Janet and Lacy’s rapport is at once immensely tight and yet also detached; a scene in which Lacy watches her mother at a country dance, spinning round and round with a bevy of partners, suggests the chasm between them, and between Lacy and a grown-up world she hasn’t fully entered and wants to comprehend. Like virtually every other aspect of her film, however, Baker’s close-ups strain hard to convey depths of emotion, in the process interfering with the very sentimentality she seeks.
Lacy’s occasionally blunt pronouncements are all that passes for humor in Janet Planet, which primarily opts for a very tranquil tone defined by an audioscape of calm environmental noises, and character movements that are minimal and mechanical; even the way Lacy turns the pages of her sheet music is performed with the absolute lightest of touches. None of the director’s soft-and-placid formal and narrative embellishments would be objectionable on their own. Together, though, they transform the proceedings into a stiflingly theatrical affair in which nothing resonates as natural and, consequently, scant meaningful engagement with Janet and Lacy’s individual and joint plights is engendered.
“What are we even talking about?” asks Regina during one late-night chat with Janet, and the question applies to virtually every back-and-forth in Janet Planet, where what’s said is superficially banal but meant to linger in the air—during all those pauses between every uttered word—with weighty significance. Awash in labored discussions and aesthetic devices, and infused with kitschy fondness for its early ’90s era, it’s the type of film whose tremendous, transparent effort at making us feel what the filmmaker feels is inversely proportional to its effect.
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