“Janet Planet” - Film Review
There are few relationships more confounding and confusing than that of a parent and a child. Two people irrevocably linked together, as alike as they are different. Incapable of ever fully knowing one another, yet able to understand each other intimately. It’s a relationship that’s often fraught, and reaches highs and lows unlike any other. That’s what makes it such a great foundation for a film. The mother-daughter connection takes center stage in Annie Baker’s gorgeous debut, Janet Planet. Equal parts heartwarming and heart-rending, Janet Planet is an ode to the loneliness that creeps into our deepest relationships and the little joys that come from sharing an existence with someone else.
We first meet Lacy (Zoe Ziegler) at summer camp. It’s 1991, the mosquitos are buzzing, and all Lacy wants is to go home. She decides to take matters into her own hands and calls her mother, Janet (Julianne Nicholson), to come pick her up. Janet agrees and arrives the next day with her boyfriend, Wayne (Will Patton), to take Lacy home. Janet Planet languidly unfolds over the course of the summer before sixth grade. Lacy mostly keeps to herself, she struggles to make friends, but she always finds herself caught up in her mother’s orbit. She’s not the only one. Janet Planet is structured around the people who fall into the world of Janet and Lacy. However brief, however bright.
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Janet Planet gives the audience the sensation of seeing the formation of Lacy’s core memories. Baker’s camera lingers on close-ups, like the side of Wayne’s and her mother’s heads as they drive her home from summer camp. For as long as Lacy lives, she’ll remember the way her sticky, summer-sweaty thighs would cling to the linoleum in the backseat of the car and the sliver of her mother’s head that was visible from her vantage point. It’s these moments, the jangle of a mother’s earring on a car ride, that endure the test of time. Janet Planet relishes in the act of the creation of a memory. Something intangible, yet concrete to hold onto in your brain when there’s nothing physically left.
“Can I have a piece of you?” Lacy asks Janet one night as she’s falling asleep. Lacy’s too young to know that she has so many pieces of her mother in her. Pieces that will only make themselves obvious as she grows older, but now, she is eleven and under the impression that no one could possibly understand her. It’s partially true. Even Janet cannot, at times, understand Lacy, but she knows her. It’s a very important distinction, one that won’t become clear for Lacy until she’s older. The two of them often feel like it’s them against the world, but that has its own detriments. Lacy cannot play daughter and therapist to her mother, even if she so desperately wants to take on both roles.
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Janet Planet is filled with a magic that comes from the sense of nostalgia oozing from every frame. There’s such unbothered joy in watching Lacy make her first real friend and the way they race through the hallways of the local mall before crashing at a bookstore and reading to one another. When you’re eleven, entire lifetimes exist in the summer breaks from June to September. These summers are sprawling, but never listless. Even though Lacy doesn’t have a gaggle of friends to spend her days with, she’s so lost in her own imagination that there’s always something vying for her attention. Janet Planet is for the weirdos who found more solace in art than they did with other people when they were young. For the adventures taken and missed, all in the name of growing up.
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