(Annie Baker, 2024, USA, 113 minutes)
Lacy: Every moment of my life is hell.
Janet: I hate it when you say things like that.
It isn't unusual for playwrights, like Tony Kushner and Suzan-Lori Parks, to turn to screenwriting, but it's more unusual for a playwright to turn to both screenwriting and directing as Annie Baker has done with Janet Planet (and before her, Celine Song with Past Lives). Notably, all three writers have won the Pulitzer Prize; Baker won in 2014 for The Flick, a play centered on movie ushers--a sign she may have already had her sights set on movie directing.
I wouldn't want to suggest that playwriting only works a certain way, because there are many different kinds of plays, but it's natural to expect dialogue to be paramount. And while there's nothing wrong with the dialogue in Baker's debut--on the contrary--she doesn't lean on it the way you might expect from a playwright.
Instead, she gets considerable mileage out of sights beyond the actors and sounds beyond their words; something harder to pull off on stage. She sets a mood, and sticks with it, just as a composer might. There are variations on a theme, but she never deviates from the hazy, summer vibe she establishes from the start. (Swedish cinematographer Maria von Hausswolff, who provided the dreamy, 16mm look of Hlynur Pálmason's A White, White Day, does much the same here.)
The film, which takes place in Western Massachusetts in 1991, begins with a call from 11-year-old Lacy (Zoe Ziegler, a dark-eyed, pensive-looking child) to her single mother, Janet (the invaluable Julianne Nicholson, last seen in the nightmarish Dream Scenario). It's late at night, she's at a sleepaway camp, and she just can't take it anymore. She's also awkward and overly-dramatic, as creative people tend to be. "I'm gonna kill myself--I'm gonna kill myself if you don't come get me," she states, and so Janet dutifully arrives the next day to collect her. All the while, crickets sing their song. Paul Hsu's subtle, subterranean sound design, which includes the whistling and cooing of birds, plays throughout the film in place of a traditional score.
Lacy would rather hang out with Janet, an unpredictable if known quality, than age-appropriate kids she's never met before, something I found incredibly relatable. It's hard to be a shy kid. Having a permissive mother can be both a refuge and a restraint, because you can only really get to know other people if you try. Lacy doesn't, and nor does Janet encourage her--they even sleep in the same bed most nights--but a greater tension lies between her mother's desire for male companionship and her devotion to her daughter, not least because she has, as a friend notes, terrible taste in men.
Baker divides the film into three chapters, starting with Will Patton's gruff, grizzled, migraine-prone, divorced dad Wayne. If I hadn't known Patton was in the film, I wouldn't have recognized him, because she rarely shows his face in full. It's possibly because we see everything from Lacy's point of view, and Wayne doesn't pay her much attention. In fact, it's largely why Janet breaks up with him--he isn't all that great with kids, including Sequoia (Edie Moon Kearns), the preteen daughter with whom Lacy briefly bonds.
Left to her own devices, Lacy practices on a portable piano, rides her bike to town, and works on a diorama, which recalls a theater stage, an indication that this story might have autobiographical elements. In 1991, after all, Massachusetts-born Baker was 10 years old, though she didn't grow up with a single mother, and nor is she one herself. She and her husband, Nico Baumbach, have one child--which means that actor/director Owen Kline, the son of Phoebe Cates and Kevin Kline, played a version of Nico in The Squid and the Whale, Noah's take on their parents' contentious marriage (Nicholson, a married mother of two, also grew up in Massachusetts).
Though set in the 1990s, Janet Planet reminded me of my own childhood in the 1970s, a time when a lot of divorced women were trying to find themselves, sometimes with children in tow. My mom worked as a counselor at a free clinic in Alaska, and met a lot of colorful people. Janet works as an acupuncturist, and the colorful people in her orbit include Regina (British actress Sophie Okonedo) and Avi (one-time Atom Egoyan regular Elias Koteas), members of an experimental theatrical troupe and/or cult dedicated to "radical and personal love." And zucchini. Lots and lots of zucchini.
Unemployed and broke after giving away all of her worldly possessions, Regina moves in with Janet after her breakup with Avi. Koteas and Okonedo, an Oscar nominee for Hotel Rwanda, are both cast against type as hippies out of time, parts I haven't seen either actor play before--if anything, Koteas's deadpan affect reminded me of Tom Noonan. Like Wayne, Avi gets a chapter to himself, and it doesn't end any more happily. As Janet tells Lacy, "I've always had this knowledge, deep inside of me, that I could make any man fall in love with me if I really tried, and I think maybe it's ruined my life." Painful pause. "I've never really said that out loud before."
The chapter headings operate like the acts of a play, even if Janet Planet never looks like one. It has a firm sense of place. If Janet talks to Lacy like an adult, it isn't because Baker doesn't have a feel for parent-child communications, but because that's how these two relate. Janet even asks Lacy if she should break up with Wayne--naturally, she says yes. It's how my mom talked to me; it can help a kid to mature, but it can be isolating, too, because relating to other kids is also part of growing up, except Lacy doesn't have any friends. "It's a complete mystery to me," she tells Regina in a scene that comes across as more amusing than sad, because it isn't hard to see why. It also seems likely that that will change in time.
Though Janet and Lacy don't look much alike, other than a reddish tint to their hair, that seems to be the point.
Men are attracted to Janet in ways the scrawny, bespectacled Lacy, who favors baggy t-shirts, fears they won't be attracted to her when she's older. Nor is she certain she's even interested in men, possibly because she hasn't met many she likes. As she tells Regina, "Men are always falling in love with my mother." Explains Regina, who possibly harbors a crush of her own: "She's fantastic."
It's possible Lacy favors her father's looks, but Baker never references him in any way. What might seem like an oversight in a different film works perfectly in this one. Janet Planet isn't about the past, but the present, and possibly even the future. Nicholson has always been a fine actress, and it was satisfying to see her pick up an Emmy Award for her excellent work on HBO's suburban murder mystery Mare of Easttown, but she really rises to the occasion here, though if she didn't have a believable chemistry with the untrained Ziegler, it wouldn't matter as much, but she definitely does.
Janet Planet proves that Baker has as much of a feel for film as she does for theater, and that Julianne Nicholson, longtime supporting player on shows like Law & Order: Criminal Intent and in independent films like I, Tonya, could use more leading roles. As the searching, yet nurturing Janet, she felt intimately familiar. Viewers with more traditional notions of motherhood may find her flaky or irresponsible, but I didn't see it that way at all. It's just that, for her daughter, trying to figure out yourself and your place in the world at the same time as your mother can be confusing and frustrating, no matter how much you know she loves you. But it's never, ever boring.
Whatever this world can give to me
It's you, you're all I see
--Queen (John Deacon), "You're My Best Friend"
Near as I can tell, the film's title has nothing to do with Van Morrison's wife, Janet Rigsbee, who he nicknamed Janet Planet. Janet Planet, the film, opens at Regal Thornton Place and other area theaters on Fri, June 28; sneak previews on Thurs, June 27. Images from Film at Lincoln Center (Julianne Nicholson and Zoe Ziegler), Chlotrudis Society for Independent Film and Film at Lincoln Center (Nicholson and Ziegler), and Movie Insider (Nicholson).
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