The first shot of Janet Planet, like much of the Pulitzer-winning playwright Annie Baker’s debut film, hints at something ominous and grand. It’s dusk; a young girl runs down a field toward an old house, the air teeming with cricket chirps and birdsong. The long shot and soundscape are wonderfully lush and evocative, and also typical for a vast swath of the suburban to rural US. “I’m going to kill myself,” 11-year-old Lacy (a remarkable Zoe Ziegler) tells her mother on the phone, a statement that would seem horribly portentous if not for her clarification: “I’m going to kill myself if you don’t come pick me up.” From summer camp.
Childhood boredom, loneliness, homesickness, the arduously languid days of summer – these are the opening notes of Baker’s nostalgic, suffusive film, which chooses the formative ordinary over dramatic convention at every turn. From Infinite Life to The Flick, Baker has made an illustrious stage career glimpsing the big, aching mysteries of life through its smallest and most banal of details – the everyday memories and the would-be throwaway comments. Janet Planet, which loosely tracks the summer of 1991 in the life of Lacy and her single mother Janet (Julianne Nicholson) in rural western Massachusetts, doubles down on her ethos of attention: that one need not require great tides of action, conflict or stakes to be worthy of art.
