SUMMERTIME, AND THE LIVIN' IS...

Janet Planet - 🐱🐱🐱🐱🐱 5 Maryellens

It’s after lights-out at camp, and all is quiet except for the droning frogs and crickets of summer in New England. There’s no moon, only a yellow disc of lamplight that picks out the edges of a cabin’s clapboard siding. The screen door creaks open, and a little girl tiptoes out. The camera turns to watch her head down the hill to the main lodge. Once inside, girl places a call at the payphone. “If you don’t come get me, I’m going to kill myself.”

Right away, Lacie (Zoe Zigler) makes a claim for our hearts. She’s definitely the most interesting character I met at the New York Film Festival: 10 years old, with bright red hair and gold-rimmed glasses, she’s sly, observant, quarrelsome, determined, and utterly hilarious, breathing anarchic life into Janet Planet, writer-director Annie Baker’s marvelous film debut. Mom (Julianne Nicholson) does come pick her up the next morning, and Lacie spends the summer not singing camp songs or making crafts but learning the way of things in Mom’s adult universe, the sometimes wacky, sometimes wonderful world of the title.  

There’s not a ton of editorializing in Janet Planet; Zigler’s wide-open face provides all the comment we could hope for. There’s no score to speak of, except for the simple piano tunes Lacie’s learning from her teacher, the music she and her mom catch during a magical outdoor performance, and the occasional songs that play on the radio. And the camera is still throughout: Cinematographer Maria von Hausswolf composes beautiful, retrained shots, nearly still summer canvases of the worlds large and tiny that our voyant is exploring. When Lacie’s in the frame, we usually find her at the bottom. She’s only half as tall as everyone else, after all—she even has to climb into it in at least one unforgettable shot.

It wasn’t so much that Lacie hated camp, but she worships her mom, and missed sleeping next to her every night. Janet’s boyfriend, Wayne (Will Patton), thinks this is weird. He knows a thing or two about weird, it turns out. In fact, much of Janet’s world is a bit odd—the move is set sometime in the early nineties, but it could well be the sixties. (The setting is Western Massachusetts, where many folks remain in that decade even now.) Janet is an acupuncturist, and there’s much serious talk about self-improvement and self-actualization. We soon run into an old friend of hers, Regina (Sophie Okonedo), who belongs to a nearby theater troupe—or is it a cult?

This is my kind of movie. (Indeed, Janet Planet reminds me a lot of my favorite film from last year, Charlotte Wells’ brilliantly melancholy Aftersun, which likewise followed a child’s confused journey into adult terrain.) Call it an unfinished character study. Baker gives us a few vivid character sketches and then takes her time to flesh them out. Mood and scene count for a lot. We linger with Lacie in the lovely summer stillness, and by some strange alchemy, her memories somehow become ours. Baker wants us to supply the grownup brushstrokes she withholds, drawing us slowly into Lacie’s inner life, never venturing outside her half-formed point of view. We learn more and more about Mom’s dreams and troubles—and Nicholson, harried and heartbroken and very funny, is absolutely brilliant—but the storytelling is necessarily oblique.

This is the summer Lacie is finally old enough to see her mom clearly, and maybe herself, too. She’s at a place everyone older than 15 remembers with longing and regret: that painful pivot from child to grownup. Pieces of us will arrive with her at the movie’s profound conclusion. Lacie’s got all the facts, but she’s years away from knowing the answer.