Annie Baker’s Summer Stock

Meghan Racklin reviews “Janet Planet,” the debut feature film from playwright Annie Baker.

By Meghan RacklinAugust 12, 2024

• Film

IT IS ONLY outside in the summertime, among the grass and trees, that you realize just how loud silence can be. It feels appropriate that playwright Annie Baker would be particularly attuned to this kind of quiet. Her famed silences are always full of presence, of meaning and misunderstanding. The sounds of the Massachusetts woods—their particular insects, their particular birds, the wind through their particular trees—form the backdrop to Janet Planet (2023), Baker’s debut film. Nearly every moment—including deeply interior ones, moments when you can sense characters thinking, feeling, grasping for language, or reveling in its absence—is full of the world.

The movie takes place in 1991, the summer before Lacy, the film’s protagonist, starts middle school. Lacy, played by Zoe Ziegler with an interiority and lack of self-consciousness rare in even adult actors, lives with her mother Janet (a warm and charming Julianne Nicholson), who brilliantly demonstrates something held back beneath Janet’s magnetic charisma, the weight of knowledge and experience that her daughter still lacks. When Lacy asks her mother whether she would mind if, in the future, Lacy dated women, Janet responds kindly and with remarkable candor—she would be happy, and has wondered herself whether Lacy, with her “aggressive quality,” might have a hard time dating men. It is a moment that demonstrates what makes Janet so lovable but also hints at a pain that, even with the lack of boundaries in their relationship, her daughter can’t know. Shortly afterwards, she tells Lacy, “I’ve always had this knowledge deep inside of me that I could make any man fall in love with me if I really tried. And I think maybe it’s ruined my life.”

It is a change of season for Lacy, and Baker precisely captures a New England summertime, both its look and its feel. There is something about summer in humid places: time becomes as heavy as the air, all pressure and haze. This hothouse feeling is there in Baker’s pacing and in cinematographer Maria von Hausswolf’s eye, in shots that linger on dust in a sunbeam, all that accumulated time, the pieces of ourselves we leave around the house. Baker is an assured director, unafraid of slowness. The movie is full of scenes of Lacy lying in the grass, lying under a table, lounging on the couch plinking away at her keyboard piano, heating up frozen blintzes in real time.

Lacy’s primary occupation, aside from being with her mother, is tending to the figurines—a jumbled lot, some homemade, some porcelain—in her makeshift marionette theater. She cares for the dolls more than she plays with them, tucking them in at night, feeding them juice and blueberries made of clay. She is at an age when it is just beginning to be embarrassing to play with dolls, which is also the age of greatest guilt at leaving your dolls behind.

Janet Planet could be called a period piece, set more than 20 years in the past, and it is precise about the details—the book Lacy flips through (from the popular series The Baby-Sitters Club), the blocks of clay she uses for the blueberries. But it is ambivalent about nostalgia. This is not to say the film lacks love for this time and the cadences life takes on. Rather, it operates with a kind of clarity that nostalgia often lacks, as if you could live a time that you’re nostalgic for again, see it as adult and child both, and see both adulthood and childhood as inscrutable and private.

For Lacy, mother and daughter are a whole world unto themselves, but from the movie’s beginning, there are other people pressing in on their two-person privacy. The movie is structured in three acts, each defined by a new presence in their lives. First, it’s Janet’s mostly silent and slightly boorish boyfriend Wayne (Will Patton); then her charming if flighty friend Regina (Sophie Okonedo), an actress who was, until recently, a member of a cultlike local theater troupe; then the spiritual and somewhat sinister Avi (Elias Koteas), the leader of the theater troupe, as well as Regina’s erstwhile lover. Their relationship is triangulated through this rotating cast of third parties, a dynamic that underscores Lacy and Janet’s obvious closeness at the same time as it unveils their fundamental distance.

In the first scene, Lacy, off and alone at sleepaway camp, runs down a dark hill, headed for the light of the telephone box. “I’m gonna kill myself if you don’t come get me,” she tells her mother, who shows up the next morning. As she’s leaving (in a move typical of lonely children, she lies and tells her bunkmates that her mother’s boyfriend was in a horrible motorcycle accident), another girl gives Lacy a troll doll to take with her. “I want to stay. I’ve changed my mind,” she pleads with Janet. “I thought nobody liked me, but I was wrong.” “This is a bad pattern,” Janet says. “And I’ve already convinced them to give me part of my deposit back.”

Their drive home is shot, like much of the movie, from Lacy’s perspective. We see Janet from the back seat, her beautiful, freckled skin, the edges of her smile; later, we see shots filmed from the margins of conversations, conversations between adults glimpsed through windows. Lacy almost had a summer on her own among other children, but instead she is, as she was, a child in a world of adults, at the periphery of her own life, orbiting her mother like a satellite.

Janet has her own bad patterns. At one point, Lacy tells Regina, “Lots of people fall in love with my mom.” “Well, your mom is fantastic,” Regina replies. “But she also has terrible taste in men.” Regina later moves out after a fight with Janet about the latter’s repeated bad choices. Lacy exercises her own power in their relationship: after Wayne lunges at Lacy, Janet asks her what she should do. When Lacy tells her to break up with him, she does, like a puppet on a string.

Lacy feels Janet’s absence deeply, physically. When Janet tells Lacy that she can’t sleep in her bed with her, Lacy asks Janet to leave a piece of herself behind. Janet, in the long tradition of loved ones leaving, gives Lacy a strand of her hair. Lacy holds it, marveling, in the moonlight, as the follicle clinging to the end catches the light, as living tissue gives way to dead matter. Theirs is a close, enclosed relationship, encased in their curving house and in the space between them, but Lacy is beginning to sense everything that fills that space spilling over. Regina, getting high with Janet as Lacy looks on, asks, “What are we even talking about when we talk about mothers? What are we even talking about?” She remembers the womb, she says: “There’s no language for it. No thinking and no language.”

This is the way of mothers and daughters, a separating: we long for an impossible utopia beyond or before thinking and language, a relationship without the space between people that is full of everything unsaid or misunderstood.

Summer, with its molasses light, seems to stand for life’s span, the way a succession of the same slow days can suddenly be gone, past in an instant; fall enters, stage right, in the form of a few changing leaves, a letter in the mail with class assignments from school. Time in Janet Planet also has a seasonal, circular quality. In The Antipodes, a Baker play from 2018, a character explains that she views time as “a spiral” because, she says,

certain things happen over again
Like certain patterns
But … it’s always going somewhere … but then there are these repetitions and you always think the you in the past is stupid and the you in the present is smarter but actually you might just be in a different part of the circle and in a couple of years you’ll be back at the same spot again, but just farther down. Farther ahead. So you kind of spiral spiral spiral […] until I guess you die.

Janet Planet is not a linear bildungsroman but something else, with Lacy and Janet’s bad patterns receding and returning. On its surface, it’s a coming-of-age story about the realization that your parents are their own people, a world unto themselves, but just beneath, it is a coming-of-age and an anti–coming-of-age story at once. If time works this way, the space between childhood and adulthood is both unbridgeable and uncomfortably close. If time works this way, the epiphanic moments that coming-of-age narratives turn on are momentary, undone by other epiphanies and realized again later. Janet and Lacy are both spiraling through time. “You know what’s funny?” Lacy tells her mom. “Every moment of my life is hell.” Then she adds: “I don’t think it’ll last though.” “I’m actually pretty unhappy too,” Janet replies.

Even as the distance between them widens with each successive guest, their closeness can feel oppressive. Janet and Avi go on a picnic together, a rare moment without Lacy. (“You’re invited, of course,” Janet bluntly tells Lacy, who is lying on the couch feeling sick. It does not, and is not meant to, sound like an invitation.) “[S]ometimes,” Janet tells Avi, picnic basket in hand, “I feel like she’s watching me.” “When you’re not with her?” Ari asks. “Yeah,” Janet says.

This is a movie invested in the sensation of being watched, a concern the movie shares with John (2015), perhaps Baker’s best play, in which one character repeatedly asks others whether they’ve ever felt an unseen presence watching over them, whether they believe there is “a larger presence watching you from somewhere.” There, as here, there is an awareness of an absent present, or a present absence, a larger, unsayable something lurking just outside of yourself. There is a sense that you are never alone in your aloneness; the silence is full of noise. Describing her experience of communion with the universe, a character in John explains, “I felt less alone being alone. I mean I felt more lonely but less alone. No. Sorry. More alone but less lonely.”

Perhaps this, too, is the way of mothers and daughters.

This is also an actor’s concern, and a director’s—the question of who is watched and who is watching are also questions of control and freedom. Tied to the specific environment it inhabits, to the scales of time and space that mark childhood summers, Janet Planet makes use of the shifts in perspective the camera allows, sidestepping the ghost of “filmed theater” that haunts movies by playwrights. But it is unmistakably a movie about theater and performance. Janet worries that her desire to be liked, her desire to be loved, her own image of herself, obscures the truth, a worry that amounts to a fear of the way she performs herself and how she is seen. (In a recent New Yorker profile, Baker, a Brooklyn writer with a Moleskine notebook, expressed her fear that she would be mistaken for a Brooklyn writer with a notebook, a concern about truth, misrecognition, and ego that seems to inform Janet’s character.)

Theater, with its dynamics of power and performance, is not just an operative metaphor for Janet Planet but a tangible, powerful presence in the world of the film. A pivotal scene takes place at an outdoor performance by Avi and Regina’s theater troupe, and later, during a visit to the troupe’s headquarters with Avi, the elaborate costumes seem to be almost thrumming with life. And there is Lacy, of course, the puppet master of her own dollhouse theater.

The movie’s attention to dolls is something else Janet Planet shares with John, a play that makes much of dolls, their felt presence, their feelings, their watchfulness. This investment in the being of inanimate objects reflects how Baker’s work has, over the last handful of years, become increasingly attuned to the surreal. Her surrealism is a naturalistic one, concerned with the uncanniness of the world and things that can’t quite be explained. This tendency has a comfortable place here, in Baker’s first work featuring a child; children are least sure of how things are supposed to be and so perhaps more aware of how weird things often are.

There is a strange, surreal, perfect moment in Janet Planet, towards the end, when Avi reads to Janet from the fourth poem of Rilke’s Duino Elegies (1923), one about mortality and puppetry and actors and parents. In a shift from the movie’s established, patient camera, the picnic scene is intercut with a scene of Lacy at home, performing a kind of ritual with her dolls. Janet asks Avi to repeat something, but somehow, suddenly, Avi is gone. Janet walks calmly down the hill alone and, before returning home to Lacy, sits in her car. In a beautiful unwatched moment—except by the director, and the audience, always indicted in any story about watching—she devours a chicken wing.

There is always a trade-off between privacy and control: we may want to control other people, hold them close, but it is their inaccessible privacy that makes them alive and wonderful to us, even as it makes strangers out of those we love. As the movie ends, Janet drags Lacy along to a dance class. Lacy sits on the sidelines, refusing to dance. She watches her mother with a succession of dance partners, spinning closer to her and then further away.