‘Janet Planet’: Telluride Review

Dir/scr: Annie Baker. US. 2023. 112mins

In real life, coming-of-age stories don’t happen in a vacuum — we are all a product of the environments in which we grew up and the people who shaped us. Janet Planet, the accomplished feature directorial debut of acclaimed playwright Annie Baker, illustrates this point with piercing intelligence, following an awkward 11-year-old over one momentous summer. First-time actor Zoe Ziegler impresses as the young girl quietly absorbing the life her single mother has created, with Julianne Nicholson equally marvellous as her loving but unknowable parent. Indeed, it is Nicholson’s character who provides the title, offering a hint of the film’s shifting focus between child and parent — as well as its delicate portrait of two souls coming together and subtly breaking apart.

 Cinematographer Maria von Hausswolff gives the summery images a faded impermanence

A24 premieres Janet Planet at the Telluride Film Festival, with a New York Film Festival berth planned for October. A US release hasn’t been announced yet, but this intimate, emotionally expansive drama could be a critics’ darling. Arthouse crowds should be enthralled, as will fans of Baker’s stage work including her film-centric 2013 play The Flick, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. 

Set in 1991 in rural Massachusetts, Janet Planet introduces us to Lacy (Ziegler), who calls her mother from camp, calmly informing her that if she does not come and get her immediately, she will kill herself. On cue, Janet (Nicholson) arrives, used to her needy, socially anxious daughter’s behaviour. It is the summer before Lacy enters middle school, and she is having a hard time separating from her mum — so much so that they share the same bed, much to the annoyance of Janet’s current boyfriend Wayne (Will Patton). 

Over the course of the film, which is divided into chapters, Lacy will spend substantial time with three meaningful figures who enter her mother’s life, starting with Wayne. The second is a long-lost friend, Regina (Sophie Okonedo), with whom Janet has a complicated history, and then finally Avi (Elias Koteas), a theatre director who is Regina’s former lover. Each of these chapters primarily involves Janet but we see them through Lacy’s eyes, with Ziegler portraying a sensitive child who takes everything in, never once exuding adorable-kid mannerisms. 

Instead, the character is a bright, willful, sometimes exasperatingly petulant young person, her insecurities and inability to connect with strangers leaving her a bit stranded. (When Lacy says she doesn’t have any friends, it is not hard to see why — although she has also taken to making melodramatic declarations like “Every day of my life is hell.”) There’s nothing precocious or forced about the performance, and it’s a credit to Baker and Ziegler that Lacy feels so authentic – both endearing and occasionally insufferable. 

Nicholson matches her young co-star in terms of creating a character full of rough edges and gentle humanity. Baker understands how difficult it is for children to see their parents in their entirety — the child’s worldview is too blinkered, their life experience too limited — and, because the film is from Lacy’s perspective, Janet is meant to be something of an enigma. But Nicholson keeps adding different textures so that we (and Lacy) begin to gain a greater sense of this wandering, chronically dissatisfied soul. 

A woman who easily attracts the attention of men, but who tends to choose the wrong romantic partners, Janet has gone through a series of jobs — she’s currently working as an acupuncturist — but Nicholson refuses to leave us with a permanent opinion of someone who cannot find a solid foundation. As much as Janet wishes Lacy would grow out of her clinginess, Baker’s deftly understated screenplay argues that the co-dependence goes both ways. This mother talks to her child like an adult, deeply loving the one person who has not left her or let her down. But as Janet Planet moves from chapter to chapter, and from one new outside character to the next, their bond begins to fray, leading to a muted, moving finale.

Shooting on film, Godland cinematographer Maria von Hausswolff gives the summery images a faded impermanence, as if we are watching a memory slowly receding. The world around Lacy, conceived with a minimum of fuss by production designer Teresa Mastropierro, is a hippie-ish community of artists and outsiders, which speaks to Janet’s rootlessness but also suggests why the 11-year-old may be itching for something more permanent. And the supporting cast, led by Patton, Okonedo and Koteas, do wonders with brief but memorable roles. Each of their characters, alongside Janet, will provoke Lacy to start seeing her life differently. Janet Planet is alive with possibility, not just for the youngster but also for the remarkable writer-director who announces her big-screen ambitions with stunning force.