Janet Planet | 2024
Julianne Nicholson and Zoe Ziegler in Janet Planet. Courtesy of A24.
Coming out of Annie Baker's Janet Planet this week, I found myself mostly underwhelmed, wanting to like this beguiling little oddity but unable to fully settle into its peculiar rhythms. Then a funny thing happened as I sat down to write this review - the more I wrote and the more I reflected on what I had seen, the more it started to open up for me.
On the surface, Janet Planet has all the trappings of a quirky indie comedy from the early 2000s. It's filled with awkward silences, deadpan humor, and characters who do a lot of standing and staring, creating an air of disaffection that creates both an unusual rhythm and a sense of ironic disconnection with the audience.
That distance is, of course, part of the point. Our protaganist, Janet (Julianne Nicholson) is a single mother, her 11-year-old daughter Lacy (Zoe Ziegler) is a bit of a loner who we first meet calling her mom to pick her up from summer camp because she thinks no one likes her, an assumption she quickly discovers is incorrect when she sees how sad her fellow campers are to see her go. Over the course of the summer, three people will come and go from their lives; a barely communicative single father (Will Patton), a flighty former cult member (Sophie Okonedo), and an enigmatic cult leader (Elias Koteas).
As Janet tries to navigate her own lonliness, Lacy begins to create her own rich inner life, often expressed through the figurines she arranges on her bookshelf like a stage. These figures become an outlet through which she exerts control over the often ephemeral world around her that her inchoate nature can only barely comprehend.
It's that growing awareness that her parent is imperfect, that the world around her is often in flux and outside her control, that makes Janet Planet such a unique coming-of-age tale. Baker, who won the Pulitzer Prize in drama for her 2014 play, The Flick, doesn't give us much story to hang on to in a traditional sense - we get very little background on who these characters are, where they came from, or how they got here. Yet the world she creates nevertheless feels fully realized and lived in because of the rich interiority of her characters.
Zoe Ziegler and Julianne Nicholson in Janet Planet. Courtesy of A24.
The longer I reflected on Lacy's journey, the more profound kinship I felt with her. In one particularly affecting moment, Lacy floats a trial balloon by asking her mother how she would feel if she turned out to like girls rather than boys. While her potential queerness isn't necessarily a defining characteristic of who she is, I couldn't help but recognize the way in which her inner life becomes a refuge from the world around her. As the film moves on, that inner life begins to bleed into her reality in almost imperceptible ways, becoming something of a form of disassociation, a way of manipulating the world around her when everything seems to be in flux.
While her mother is the one constant in her life, she too is in such a state of upheaval that it leaves Lacy somewhat adrift, and that is the inherent beauty and tragedy of Janet Planet, in which a young girl takes the first steps toward self-actualization and expands the world of the film beyond the confines of its tightly composed frames from which its characters constantly seem to be trying to break free. Baker's indelible sense of place is also keenly felt here, its rural Massachusetts setting felt strangely familiar and close to home for a girl who's never lived outside of North Carolina, the trappings of rural Appalachia in the summer striking something deep within I didn't realize, or had perhaps forgotten, was there.
That's part of Janet Planet's strange and captivating beauty. It is, in essence, a tale of two lost souls just trying to muddle through somehow. Yet through the eyes of this single mother and her precocious daughter, the world feels rife with both fascinating possibilities and frightening limitations, and the truths found within that tangle of contradictions is something very special indeed.
