Few directorial debuts have arrived as fully-formed as Annie Baker's Janet Planet. Set in rural Massachusetts in the early '90s, the gentle coming-of-age drama traces the relationship between an awkward 11-year-old who can't seem to find her place in the world, and her wayward hippie mom, a free-spirited woman with a similar conundrum. A distinct sense of time, place, and mood permeates every scene, filling the frame with bittersweet nostalgia as its drama slowly unravels, revealing moments that veer between sharply funny and deeply heartrending.
In the dead of night, the young, withdrawn Lacy (Zoe Ziegler) concocts a plan to leave her summer camp, where she feels alone. This introduction is both emotionally charged and wryly funny: over a curt phone call to her mother Janet (Julianne Nicholson), Lacy threatens to kill herself if she isn't picked up the following day. Janet obliges, but brings her distant, short-tempered older boyfriend, Wayne (Will Patton), of whom Lacy is none too fond. This kicks off the first of several chapters within Janet Planet – this one simply titled "Wayne" – during which its plotless meandering is deeply purposeful. The story is set over Lacy's lengthy summer vacation, the kind of escape during which time passes slowly. While she doesn't seem eager to be back at school, she doesn't really want to be at home either, in her mother's forest cabin. In fact, she doesn't want to be anywhere.
Janet Planet is pulsing with dry, acerbic wit, but there's a purity to it. A goodness, even it at its most macabre, like when Lacy builds a morbid shrine of glass figurines to play with, or winds up a toy that chimes Mozart's Lacrimosa, which she doesn't seem to realize is a funeral march. She's imaginative, but doesn't yet grasp the full extent of her imagination; the film's humor is occasionally ironic, but never insincere. Though Lacy claims to be friendless and suicidally depressed, she likely doesn't know the meaning of the words, and even harbors the suspicion that she'll grow out of it. When she clings to her mother, their swift, back-and-forth dialogue has specific intonations. It's never quite over-pronounced, but enough to create an amusing rhythm, albeit one that's eventually interrupted when Janet begins relying on Lacy for emotional support in ways that force the young adolescent to grow up far too quickly.
Janet feels just as adrift as her daughter, but in quieter and more concerning ways. Janet Planet is structured around the arrival and departure of major characters in her life, starting with Wayne and culminating with another man she falls for, but this creates a listless sense of impermanence, and she can't help but blame herself for it too. Janet, though she hides most of her problems from Lacy, comes off as bothered and burdened, courtesy of Nicholson's wildly alluring tightrope act. She plays the kind of mother you'd expect to eventually snap, but never does, if only out of resigned acceptance.
But the secret weapon is newcomer Ziegler, who crafts a singular performance through her curious and observant gaze. Lacy tries to understand the adult world around her, and she often does, but knows better than to get involved. It's hard not to wonder if she feels Janet's sense of impermanence too, especially given the way the title cards are written. Wayne's "chapter" begins with his name, but when he eventually leaves, it ends with its own title too ("End Wayne"), and a new act doesn't fully begin until someone else – a new lover, or an old friend – waltzes into Janet and Lacy's lives. This leaves a gap in which both mother and daughter seem to wait for something to happen, for some spark that may never come.
These transitional moments especially allow Ziegler to create a wholly unique and lived-in performance that feels wise beyond her years. Through her awkward, stiff posture, and from behind her way-too-large, tomboyish T-shirt and her enormous eyeglasses, she absorbs sorrow like a sponge – though she has plenty of her own of which to speak. Well before the topic is explicitly broached, there's a specific queerness to her isolation, expressed in her body language s – especially when she seems to make a new friend in a euphoric moment that sends the camera charging through a shopping mall – and the way she wraps herself in a protective cocoon. It's hard not to consider Janet Planet a bold entry in the canon of performance-driven queer kid cinema, alongside Andrew Ahn's Driveways and Koreeda Hirokazu's Monster.
Baker, a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, has long woven eccentric character dynamics into tales of loneliness and yearning. These themes simmer just beneath the surface in her most recent play, Infinite Life, which opened off Broadway last year, around the same time as Janet Planet premiered at Telluride. They make for interesting companion pieces. Baker's most recent work seems to reckon with the implications of aging: Infinite Life follows characters dealing with chronic pain; Janet Planet, meanwhile, reads like its spiritual equivalent. (Janet herself is an acupuncturist, treating clients in a second, smaller cabin that shares its name with the film.) Physical pain can be located, but the kind of ethereal sorrow that permeates Janet and Lacy's lives is harder to recognize and name. Janet and her old friend Regina (Sophie Okonedo), a former cult member, certainly try to pin it down when they catch up after several years apart, but this subplot opens up entirely new concerns about how lost, melancholic souls become vulnerable to cults in the first place.
With Janet Planet, Baker also takes complete advantage of the new cinematic tools at her disposal to create a vibrant sense of time and place. The film has a photographic quality, between its 16mm film grain and slightly blown-out highlights that create a sun-lit radiance. The image is ever-so-slightly faded, like a memory not long enough in the past to be forgotten, but just long enough – in this case, 1991 – to need the assistance of old film and photographs to be completely remembered.
You can pinpoint the geography, time of day, and even the season and temperature of a given scene thanks to Maria von Hausswolf 's precise cinematography and Paul Hsu's meticulous sound design – there are traces of blowing wind and trilling insects to be heard in the latter. There's hardly a moment in Janet Planet that doesn't evoke specific memories, which Baker imbues with equally specific moods through her off-kilter framing. Sometimes, Lacy or Janet will be partially out of frame, but in ways that enhance their relationship to the space, to the ongoing drama, or to each other. The camera is a stage over which Baker has complete control, and she takes full advantage of this, and turns in a transformative visual work that gets to the heart of how people feel in between the vital chapters of their lives – and more importantly, why they feel. Most of all, Baker knows the power of a good close-up; she uses them sparingly and to create meaningful emotional impact, aided entirely by her impeccable performers.
