‘Janet Planet’ Review

The movie opens at night, a young girl wakes up in a cabin to the sound of crickets outside. She sneaks out of the house and walks down the hill towards a shack, where she picks up a phone.

“I’m going to kill myself.”

What a provocative, foreboding, mysterious opening line, coming from an 11 year old girl.

“I’m going to kill myself if I have to stay here.”

Oh, just a kid being overdramatic, trying to get out of summer camp.

‘Janet Planet’ is a coming of age story, but that’s not quite right. Coming of age implies some level of epiphany for the main character, a knowledge discovered that pushes them one step closer to adulthood. But this is not a film of such discoveries, it is a slice of life: one long summer in the life of an odd little girl with her flawed and confusing mother. If anything, it may be an anti-coming of age film. How can we expect the daughter to have epiphanies, when her mother is clearly still trying to figure out life for herself?

These characters, mother Janet (Julianne Nicholson) and daughter Lacy (Zoe Ziegler) are troublesome in their own ways. Zoe Ziegler as Lacy plays the kind of off-kilter, socially awkward child not seen much in movies. She is believable and authentic, but hard to love for all her quirks. She lies all the time, in ways believable of a child, denying using a houseguest’s shampoo, denying putting her hair on the shower wall. She lies to spare herself from embarrassment or judgment, but she also lies to make her life more dramatic, as she tells her fellow campers that her mom’s boyfriend suffered a motorcycle accident as a reason for leaving camp. She has a tendency for dramatic comments, that will cause an adult to roll their eyes. “Wanna hear something funny: every day of my life is Hell.” Sure, kid.

And yet the mother is flawed in her own ways, with an unexplained background of bad decisions leading to her present day. Perhaps we can see where Lacy gets her flair for dramatic pronouncements, as her mother is constantly talking about her own unhappiness, her own views on life and the world as if talking to a fellow adult, not an impressionable child. At one point midway through the movie, Janet brings Lacy to a strange, cult-like art performance with pretentious dialogue about nihilism and horrific animal muppets. If this is the world Lacy is seeing, her behavior becomes a little more understandable. This mother daughter relationship feels very authentic, that of a single mother forming such a fierce co-dependency with her only daughter.

The acting and writing are great, with each character having their own distinct speaking pattern and personality. The standout is Sophie Okonedo as Regina, an old friend of Janet’s who comes to stay with them. During perhaps the best scene of the film, Regina and Janet take some drugs and spend the night on a high, speaking thoughts that are deep and insightful in ways that drugs make anything seem deep. This is practically the only time in the movie when Lacy disappears into the background, allowing adults the space to share their own growth moments.

This is the debut film from director Annie Baker, and she shows the patience and technical skill of a confident veteran. She lets her shots linger, mirroring the languid pace of terminal summer days to the mind of a child. Seemingly shot on film, the movie has a texture, a graininess that evokes the nostalgia for its year: 1991. The form matches the subject perfectly.

Ultimately, the movie doesn’t quite stick the landing. It is a beautiful snapshot of this time in life for both mother and daughter, and yet doesn’t deliver any lasting insight. While this may reflect the true messiness and anticlimax of life, it compromises the poignancy and left me hoping for more.

Janet Planet
Rated PG-13 for brief strong language, some drug use and thematic elements.
Running Time: 1 hour and 53 minutes

Director Annie Baker
Writers Annie Baker
Stars Julianne Nicholson, Zoe Ziegler, Elias Koteas, Will Patton, Sophie Okonedo
Rating PG-13
Running Time 113 Minutes
Genres Drama