Celtic soul enthusiasts will first associate the title of this film with Janet Rigsbee, first wife of Van Morrison, who, as Janet Planet, acted as inspiration on the northern oddball’s early albums. That’s her on the cover of Tupelo Honey. The couple did indeed, like the characters in Annie Baker’s captivating feature debut, spend time in a less busy corner of Massachusetts, and Janet Planet, though set in the present day, captures much of that post-hippy Shangri-La.
This has its risks. Not everyone will remain patient with the avant-garde puppet shows, alternative health therapies and children named Sequoia. But, to be fair, Baker, a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, is prepared to poke gentlest fun at the denizens of this sun-dappled arcadia. Why not? Woody Allen did the same to the snoots of his beloved Manhattan.
For the most part, however, Janet Planet is a fine-grained, unhurried study of an admirable parent and her singular daughter. Janet (Julianne Nicholson) is, yes, the planet around which young Lacy (Zoe Ziegler) revolves. The film, not overburdened with plot, is much taken up with three visitors to the family’s attractive home over a languorous summer that takes in the reading of at least one Rainer Maria Rilke poem. Will Patton is convincingly flattened as a divorcee with serious charm shortage. The reliably charismatic Sophie Okonedo then appears as an old chum not sure if she is escaping a papier-mache-friendly performance cult (if you can imagine anything so ghastly). Lastly, poor Lacy must endure Elias Koteas as a borderline-sinister, borderline-stupefying theatre director.
Baker and her cinematographer, Maria von Hausswolf, effectively conjure up a blistering heat that, even if the characters were not so undemonstrative, would surely squash them into short-breathed inaction. The dialogue does not much overlap. Pauses stretch out as conversation collapses into the most comfortable chair. Birdsong and rustling foliage fill the gap. There is a sense of tensions that nobody quite has the energy to tease out into open hostility. Von Hausswolf arranges characters within the frame in a fashion that alternates between classical balance and, notably when Mum leans in to comfort Lacy under a table, a packed, groaning claustrophobia.
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The eponymous Janet – an acupuncturist, of course – displays little ideological muscle, but it is clear we are looking at the gentler wing of alternative parenting. We are a long way from games consoles, hopped-up instant desserts and Saturday afternoon at the mall. Lacy looks to live a life untroubled by huge traumas, but she nonetheless appears to be giving in to very grown-up anxieties. “Every moment of my life is hell,” she says, shortly after requesting a return from summer camp. She develops what seems like a psychosomatic complaint that Mum, clearly not any sort of alt-health zealot, tries to treat with antibiotics. The closest parallel in recent cinema might be to Elsie Fisher’s character in Bo Burnham’s untouchable Eighth Grade, from 2018. There is the same sense of parent and child trying to negotiate their way to happiness.
The sheer sluggishness of the characters can become frustrating. One does occasionally yearn for a bit of urban bustle and aggression. But the consistently strong cast has the right grasp of wind-chime minimalism for the subtle material. Julianne Nicholson, who has excelled recently in Mare of Easttown and Blonde (as Marilyn Monroe’s mother), confirms her rising status with a turn that quietly hints at unseen torments. The piece, nonetheless, belongs to young Zoe Ziegler. Lacy is one of the great observers in cinema. Janet Planet plays a little like a memory piece from an unknown future – the assembled past life of an adult who, as a child, grasped only a bare majority of the tensions unfolding about her. A lovely, flawed idyll.
