Film Review: Zoe Ziegler shines in ‘Janet Planet’

“Janet Planet” is a quiet movie. But every once in a while, a shock punctures the silence.

Take the film’s beginning: a young girl sneaks out of her room in the dead of night, moving swiftly across a dark field. She makes her way to a barn and finds a phone. “Hi,” she says to whoever’s on the other end. “I’m gonna kill myself.”

This is how we meet 11-year-old Lacy (Zoe Ziegler). The year is 1991, and she’s wasting away at summer camp. She has a hard time making friends, and this dramatic proclamation is how she convinces her mother Janet (Julianne Nicholson) to come and pick her up. When Janet arrives, she appears like a beacon in the grass, an angelic apparition come to save Lacy from this summer of hell. But Janet isn’t alone. Her boyfriend Wayne (Will Patton) is there, too.

Lacy thinks she might have liked to stay at summer camp after all.

“Janet Planet,” the feature debut from writer/director Annie Baker, explores the trials of growing up in the shadow of a loving, but not-so-perfect role model, about how codependency can bring people together and tear them apart. It’s a slight debut, and that stillness, while often a feature, can sometimes work against it, almost as if you can feel Baker urging the emotional gears to turn instead of letting that feeling build naturally. But in its moments of humor – and those little moments of shock – “Janet Planet” really finds its footing, particularly within Ziegler’s stellar performance.

“Janet Planet” unfolds in chapters, each one named after a new person that Janet invites to live with her and Lacy over the summer. The new person inevitably invades Lacy and Janet’s little paradise – a gorgeous, bucolic, home in rural Massachusetts, shot beautifully by cinematographer Maria von Hausswolf – and puts their relationship to the test.

Wayne is the first visitor, and within this first section Baker’s talent for blocking and for telling a story through movement and physical space comes to the forefront. In one scene, Lacy sits on the couch practicing her piano, and Janet comes to stand by the door, waiting in Lacy’s orbit but not invading her space. Later, when Lacy is playing outside, Wayne appears with a lawnmower. He starts at Lacy’s presence, a subtle contrast to how Janet moved lazily into the frame. Lacy gets up and moves, her perfect little paradise disrupted.

The second chapter, where Janet’s old friend Regina (Sophie Okonedo) comes to stay with the pair, is probably the film’s strongest, a lot on the back of Okonedo’s warm, vulnerable performance. In the talkiest part of the movie, an inebriated conversation between Regina and Janet, the two discuss Janet’s tendency to do things she knows are bad for her. When Janet rebuffs Regina’s attempts to advise her, you can see Regina close up in real time as the love she thought she was offering is denied, Okonedo stiffening her body language, her open face taking on a shaded quality.

We watch Janet fall into this pattern, but more importantly we watch Lacy watch her.  “Janet Planet” can fall into some of the traps that smaller, emotional films often do. The film overly relies on close ups, and there are a few lines that you can feel Baker assigning more weight to than they might necessarily carry. But in the moments where we watch Lacy take in her mother, Baker’s abilities as a director shine through, particularly in Ziegler’s performance.

Throughout the film, Lacy operates as a voyeur. She constantly watches Janet, and there are moments where we don’t know she’s in a scene until it’s gone on for minutes at a time and she suddenly pops up into the frame. Lacy’s silent judgment might sneak up on us at times, but it’s something that Janet can’t ever escape (the two still share a bed together, connected at the hip more so than they maybe should be at this stage). Lacy is always silently observing the adults around her, something that children often do, but movies usually push to the wayside in favor of overt precociousness. Not that Lacy isn’t smart, but her intelligence feels firmly rooted in the world she’s in and her age.

Lacy moves and speaks with an abruptness that’s ripe with humor. Laying in bed with her mom one night, she suddenly says, “You know what’s funny? Every moment of my life is hell.” There’s no malice, no real darkness to the statement – it’s a matter of fact thing she says to someone she thinks might understand. And Janet does. But, as they continue to watch and be watched, what they both begin to realize is how their codependency might contribute to their sadness. The film becomes about mother and daughter seeing each other as human first, and learning from there how to grow together and apart.

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