Review: Janet Planet (2023)
Pastoral look at a middle-aged woman and her 11-year-old daughter doesn't quite add up
Janet Planet (2023)
Written and directed by Annie Baker
De niño, back in the 1960s, I went with my parents to see the film adaptation of “The Odd Couple.” As we exited the theater, my dad harrumphed. “Just like a play!” he said. “No ending!”
While this may have been the only artistic commentary I ever heard my father utter, he wasn’t wrong. Plays and movies have different narrative atmospheres. Films classically feature clear, often moralistic (or nihilistic) endings, but plays conclude differently. The whole point of a play now seems to be to create a mood, not offer a clear resolution.
“Janet Planet” is a slow moving, beautifully shot depiction of a single mother and her keenly observant 11-year-old daughter, and it’s the debut directorial effort by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Annie Baker. As such, one might expect the narrative to lack sharp corners and easy resolutions. Perhaps to mock this expectation, the film has acts beginning and ending with title cards named after a person who becomes temporarily important in the main characters’ lives. It begins when a somewhat older man named Wayne is living with Janet and her daughter. After Janet and Wayne break up, and following one more pathetic scene of him kneeling on her lawn at night begging to be let in, we see a title card letting us know that he has disappeared from the movie’s universe: END WAYNE. It’s hard to be more clear than that. And yet by the movie’s end I found myself wanting more of a story.
Janet (Julianne Nicholson), who lives with Lacy in a rambling house in a forest in west Massachusetts, has two other short-lived relationships marked in this same way. One is with an old friend, Regina, whom Janet hasn’t seen in many years. The occasion is a theater piece with music and fantastical costumes performed in a pastoral setting as the sun sets; the other is with Avi, a guru type who leads the theater company, which is “not exactly a cult.” The relationship with Regina (Sophie Okonedo) is the most promising. Wayne was hulking and monosyllabic; Regina is intelligent, articulate, and possesses the British way of bluntness in conversation. She leaves Avi and the others in the not-a-cult theater group that lives together on a nearby farm and moves in with Janet.
Back in the 1980s — the setting of this movie, as far as I could tell, judging from the cars and the general west-Mass post-hippie environment — pop psychology was all the rage. People were expected to interrogate their feelings and the ins and outs of their relationships with others; this activity was part conscious-raising, part DIY therapy, part mutual manipulation. In the central scene of her sequence, Regina and Janet are doing this sort of emotional processing together. They have gotten high on some kind of tea and Janet is pacing back and forth trying to explain to herself why she is caught in a certain emotional pattern. At first Regina is right there with her, helping her self-examination, but then she utters a comment that brings Janet up sharply. “You stepped on my toe,” Janet says, as a figure of speech — “You interrupted me. I was trying, for once, to be less critical of myself…” The intimate conversation goes off the rails, and soon — after Lacy watches a member of Avi’s theater company packing up Regina’s belongings — we see the card that says END REGINA.
These twists and turns in Janet’s personal life are all conducted in her home and are witnessed by the keenly perceptive Lacy. In fact, during the film we see as much of Lacy and her increasingly skeptical reactions to the adults as we do of Janet herself. It wouldn’t be wrong to say that Lacy’s role as an observer and the way she processes the events in her mother’s life is really the main subject of the film.
For the most part, Lacy conducts these observations and processes her reactions and judgments silently; in much of the film, closeups are devoted to her face as she ponders the adults and their speech and behavior. But when she does ask a question, it tends to be pointed and direct. Early in the movie, when Wayne is still with them, Janet and Lacey go with him for an afternoon with his daughter Sequoia, who is about Lacy’s age. The two girls are instantly friendly and spend a couple of hours cavorting at a down-market shopping mall. Back home, aware (as all children are) of the arrangements that divorced parents usually make for their children, Lacy asks Wayne why Sequoia doesn’t live with him sometimes. He ignores the question. She permits it to hang in the air until Wayne is stricken with a migraine. Saying that Lacy’s voice is bothersome, he asks Janet more than once to shoo her from the room where he lies stricken on a cot. Standing on the threshold, Lacy shouts the same question. Wayne charges across the room and slams the door on her. He never does answer the question, or maybe it’s that his action speaks for itself.
The next sequence is about Regina’s sojourn with Janet and Lacy. As I said above, Regina seems like a much more promising housemate. Whether they used to be lovers, or whether their present relationship includes sex, is not shown, but it’s certainly intimate: they get high together and have long pop-psychology-laced conversations about their deepest selves, desires, and thoughts. Because they share history and are similar ages, Janet and Regina seem like natural partners much more than do Janet and Wayne. So I was confounded by the abruptness with which things with Regina END. I expected the film to contain a traditional rising narrative in which things for the main characters generally improve over the course of the movie, and I thought an extended relationship with Regina might be part of it. Wrong.
It’s instructive to compare “Janet Planet” with “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” (1974), in which Ellen Burstyn plays a widow with a son about Lacy’s age. In that film, Kris Kristofferson, who plays a local rancher, takes a liking to Burstyn’s diner waitress. (His now-cringeworthy first line to her is “How about a smile?” which would instantly mark him as an asshole now but back in 1974 was still regarded as charming.) Their meet-breakup-makeup arc forms a central narrative line. But in “Janet Planet,” this strategy is stymied. Janet shows some self-awareness late in the film, after she has begun to respond to courtship from Avi: “I’ve always believed that I have the power to make any man fall in love with me — and it’s ruined my life!” The nascent relationship with the would-be guru (and by the way, it seems strange that, having wooed Regina back to his theater group-cum-cult, he would try to woo Janet, who had given Regina refuge — something never addressed) ENDs even more abruptly: he simply, literally, vanishes.
About that mall sequence. The mall is decidedly retro and working-class. The anchor store is a JC Penney’s; the rest of the stores aren’t franchise outlets like Adidas or H&M, but just local stores, bravely trying to fill the spaces intended for corporate logos and shiny new products. This fits with the general threadbare character of the setting and with the thrift-store clothes the characters wear. The adults in this movie are either downwardly mobile post-hippies or genuinely working class people doing the best they can.
I know these people and this time, though I lived then in Texas and California and have never been to western Massachusetts. During the late 70s and early 80s, I was part of a dance movement that was heavily practiced by college-educated people who, shall we say, admired the hippie lifestyle and adopted some of it. We aspired to something other — better, more ecological, ideally handspun in some way or other — than the consumerist middle-class life we’d been born to. We disdained “straight” jobs (straight as opposed to square, not as opposed to gay) and, at least for a few years, consumerism. Some stopped being middle class at all and became part of the working class — waitresses, carpenters, mechanics, teachers. Some, like myself, would go back to what were, in economic terms, traditional middle-class lives: in my case, a house, car loans, a marriage (albeit open), corporate jobs.
Janet has pulled herself up far enough to become a licensed acupuncturist, though she works out of her home with its read-to-bits paperback books filling the shelves and decidedly amateurish carpentry in a round tower-like addition on the side of the house. Regina, and the guru of the theater troupe, Avi, speak and act like educated people (though there were at the time, and still are, plenty of charlatans like Avi who lacked education but knew how to sound as if they knew everything), though now all they do is DIY theater, beautiful as it is. And the film’s last scene, at a community dance, is salted with who knows how many people with graduate degrees; they’re either playing at being country folk, or have become one with them, albeit one who teaches a summer course or a graduate seminar now and then.
I was a little perplexed by the film’s plot (“Just like a play!”) or lack of it. Not that I don’t enjoy meandering movies with non-traditional narratives; I’ve written about several of them in the year that I’ve been writing this column. It’s that “Janet Planet” seems to offer narratives within the three-act structure, then pulls the rug out from under them without offering much in return in the way of character development. (Critics are of very differing opinions about what the movie is about. One has said that it’s about a girl “falling out of love with her mother.” I don’t see much evidence of that. It’s true that Lacy takes a generally skeptical approach to her observation of adults — Avi seemingly most of all — but that doesn’t seem to have changed her relationship with Janet by the end of the film.) It would make a lot of sense to reverse Acts II and III, to have the courtship by Avi end because Regina leaves his group and moves in with Janet — however Janet and Regina’s relationship eventually ends.
But seeing as critics aren’t allowed to suggest changes to films, I have to deal with it as it is. And “Janet Planet” is enjoyable, beautifully shot by the first-time director, and in many moments earns that much-overused attribute “luminous.”