Janet Planet

It’s backwards. The title. Janet Planet. You see, it should be Planet Janet, since people come into single mother Janet’s orbit. Or maybe it’s that she orbits them, briefly caught up in their gravitational field until someone drifts off, until they’re caught up by some more attractive body or head into the void.

As played by Julianne Nicholson (Tully, Dream Scenario), Janet’s life is divided into chapters that may as well be epochs, each defined by whoever is shifting her orbit at that time. There are lovers like the neurotic Wayne (Patton); old friends like Regina (Okonedo), who coachsurfs into her life; and Avi (Koteas), the calmly charismatic head of an avant-garde theatre company that feels more than a little like a cult. The one constant is daughter Lacy (newcomer Ziegler), an 11-year-old who adores her mum to the point that she has made Janet the center of her universe.

In her feature directorial debut, Pulitzer prize-winning playwright and author Annie Baker leaves Janet almost lifeless on the surface. There’s a passivity to her, as if she just waits for the people in her life to wander off (or, in one instance, magically disappear). But her existence is almost completely under the surface – suitably tectonic, with only the occasional little eruptions.

But Janet is viewed from the perspective of Lacy, a headstrong, gangly, and precocious preteen besotted with her mother. Setting the daughter as the observer makes Janet Planet a little reminiscent of What Maisie Knew, Scott McGehee and David Siegel’s 2013 adaptation of Henry James’ 1897 novel of the same name. But Maisie was six, mostly oblivious to the world of adults and divorces and second marriages. Lacy is far less passive, locked in a relationship with her mother that has the seeds of an unhealthy codependency. She’s greedy for her mother’s attention, even as Janet subtly attempts to push her hand away, encourage her to have new friends and alternative interests.

Baker captures all this with a calm, distant eye, the only melody the repetitive chirps and buzzes of the birds and bugs in this idyllic slice of rural Massachusetts in 1991. Her Pulitzer- and Obie-winning drama The Flick has been criticized for its audience-punishing three-hour-plus running time, much of it filled with her signature silences. If anything, cinema should be a better fit for her, since those voids in dialogue can be filled with imagery, and the control to catch one particular element of the scene. Baker undoubtedly catches the best of Nicholson’s extraordinary performance, a depiction of isolated motherhood. Janet swings from dysfunctional relationship to dysfunctional relationship, seemingly incapable of maintaining more than one meaningful connection at a time. There’s a subtle implication that her efforts to give Lacy a measure of independence, like a failed summer camp excursion, are more about her own isolation than real concern about her daughter.

Yet there’s something distancing and even alienating about Janet Planet. Baker has always faced the criticism that nothing really happens in her works: Her advocates argue that’s a feature, not a bug – that people doing nothing of import makes it easier to see who they are. Here the nothingness shows the strength of the performances (veteran character actor Koteas is particularly excellent, creepily channeling his inner Tom Noonan), but there’s a stilted quality to the script, an artificiality that is never balanced by charm, humor, or events. If you grew up in the 1990s post-hippie Massachusetts performance arts scene (as Baker did), Janet Planet may tug on your nostalgia, but you may not feel otherwise drawn to its ethereal qualities.