Found myself a couple of weeks ago, after a month-and-half-long work bender of bartending and festival coverage, reminiscing about how much free time I had when laid up with bronchitis this past winter. Now I’ve had a harsh, chest-filling cold since Halloween and have grown tired of watching three movies a day. What starts as a fun getaway to the post-war malaise of Hollywood noir ends in me growing tired of situations that the production code mandates the characters get themselves into and therefore it’ll be their fault when they’re punished. The moodiness matching my own mental haze leaves me lost in a dense fog.
I found out that Janet Planet, the debut film from one of America’s great contemporary playwrights Annie Baker, had finally made its way to streaming after a protracted and botched release by A24—where it’s wasted away on VOD after basically no theatrical window and little attention to its distribution since its Telluride premiere back in 2023. But with it on Max, and not having much else to do besides sit in bed with my Chromebook and see what’s on, I watched it. And I watched it again. And then again, again.
Something in Janet Planet activated a sense memory for me. I think it was the sound design, with the calls of birds and chirps of bugs cutting through the thick summer air, or the sounds of footsteps on the grass and gravel in between houses in piney backroads. Even though the story’s set in western Massachusetts in the 1990s, something in its childhood perspective and New Aged forested textures brought me back to my Oregonian upbringing in the 2000s. It was sensational—I mean that not in the sense often used by critics as a synonym for “great” (although the movie is), but in its perspective being dominated by a focus on sensations, what we immediately feel and they bring us back to another place in time.
The childhood which I’m transported back to is not the one in parallel with that of the main character, Lacy (Zoe Ziegler), in Janet Planet—Oregon vs. Western MA, boy vs. girl, suburban vs. rural, younger brother vs. only child, married parents vs. single mom—but the memory of my perception is completely in tune with the lonely, observant childhood at the center of the film. The narrative, structured around a cascade of relationships that Lacy’s mom, Janet (Julianne Nicholson), embarks on in the summer of ‘91, is less material to what the film is doing rather than how Lacy reacts to it. It’s deceptive action, in that Lacy appears to be a sideline observer to her mother Janet’s interesting and conflicting love life, except for the fact that Lacy has a bit of agency in her mother’s life. Janet takes her daughter’s opinion seriously, and when Lacy insists it’s time for Janet to break up with film’s first boyfriend, Wayne (Will Patton), she listens. Janet and Lacy have less a conventional mother-daughter relationship, one built out of mutual respect, even as the societal expectations of what their relationship should be often steps in between them.
This sort of relationship is characteristic more of the stage where Baker made a name (and Pulitzer) for herself than that of the specificity of cinema. One need only look as far at how misguided it is to translate a Sam Shephard play to the screen, creating hard boundaries for the otherwise mutable worlds of his mercurial characters (although I do have a soft-spot for Altman’s maligned adaption of Fool for Love [1985] for different reasons). The relationship of Janet and Lacy can’t be easily summarized just by the roles they’re supposed to play in each other’s lives, and they often defy the expectations of others—Janet relays to Lacy that Wayne thinks it’s weird that the two of them still often sleep in the same bed together, even though Lacy’s almost a teenager. But this is one of the most important times for the two of them, where they can confide and be honest with each other in a way that’s anything but the nature of the usually hierarchical, secretive rapport between parent and child.
Janet Planet moves to a stunning and devastating final sequence, where the film quietly culminates in Lacy’s revelation about her fickle place on the cusp of adulthood, and how that will invariably drift her and her mother apart as time goes on, how she can never really hold on to her mother despite her wishes, about the inevitability of worlds passing by each other in their ceaseless orbits. It’s sad and beautiful, a lifetime of emotion bubbling to the surface, played through the musicality of bodies in motion cut together in filmic rhythms, relayed not through words but simply by looking at action and cutting back to how one’s face reacts to it—the most basic and fundamental of cinematic principles. It’s a control of the medium that Baker has right out of the gate, her voice fully-formed and commanding the craft as if it was her artistic practice since birth.