‘Janet Planet’ Review: A Sticky Summer Full of Small Dramas

Kids are supposed to love summer, but I can’t be alone in remembering it as the most vexing season. It’s hot, and there are mosquitoes and spasms of allergic sneezes, and the predictable, sociable structure of the school year vanishes for what feels like an interminable stretch. When Lacy, the 11-year-old in the playwright Annie Baker’s brilliant “Janet Planet,” calls home from camp to tell her mother, Janet, that if she doesn’t come pick her up, she’ll kill herself — I got that, in all its hyperbolic provocation. Sometimes summer is just the worst.

But being 11 is also the worst. “You know what’s funny?” Lacy (Zoe Ziegler) asks Janet (Julianne Nicholson) a few weeks later, when she’s been brought back to the home the two share in western Massachusetts: “Every moment of my life is hell.” Janet doesn’t want to laugh, and gently corrects her. But she’s also in the throes of her own turmoil, so she gets it. “I don’t think it will last, though,” Lacy continues, acknowledging with tween stoicism her spells of hell and happiness.

Lacy’s life is not hell, no matter her solemn belief. Her mother has built a good life for the two of them, even if it’s invaded at times by friends who need help and boyfriends who Lacy knows are bad news. But every day is long and every occurrence is amplified when you’re Lacy’s age. The genius of “Janet Planet,” Baker’s debut as a feature writer-director, is how flawlessly it renders what it’s like to spend the summer being 11 at your home in the woods, when your mother is your whole world and you wish you could just have her to yourself. You can hear the buzzing bug zapper, feel the sunburn on your skin, scratch your knees on the freshly cut grass and sink into the hazy evening ennui.

Baker, who grew up in Amherst, knows the texture of those Massachusetts summers by heart. She also knows the kinds of people who populate the area, sending Janet and Lacy at one point to a midsummer mystical theatrical presentation, complete with larger-than-life puppetry, after which everyone is implored to take home all the extra zucchini the group grew by accident. “Janet Planet” is a tiny masterpiece, and it’s so carefully constructed, so loaded with details and emotions and gentle comedy, that it’s impossible to shake once it gets under your skin.

The film is divided into three big sections, centering on three adults who show up in Janet’s life, and thus Lacy’s, in the summer of 1991. First there’s Wayne (Will Patton), Janet’s boyfriend, who was expecting to have the summer alone with her. Later, there’s Regina (Sophie Okonedo), who needs a place to stay after leaving a group that’s part commune, part theater troupe and maybe part cult. Finally, there’s the leader of that group, Avi (Elias Koteas), who takes an interest in Janet and her spiritual development.

Each of these side characters is introduced theatrically — intertitles grandly announce their names as they appear in the tale, and flash an “End” onscreen when they exit. They are supporting characters in the drama that at first appears to be Lacy’s but, we eventually come to realize, is actually Janet’s. She is sorting through what her life ought to be after a period of apparent chaos, and Lacy, like most children on the verge of adolescence, is only dimly aware of her mother as a person and not just an accessory to her own existence.

This summer, though, is a kind of quiet turning point for them both, portrayed with precise and effortless wit by Ziegler and Nicholson. Lacy is nervous and bright and curious and observant — so observant, in fact, that Janet tells Avi one day, “Sometimes I feel like she’s watching me,” even when her daughter isn’t actually there. Lacy’s a loner who feels a bit on the outside of everything, working out her loneliness by arranging and rearranging her tiny figurines into tableaux of parties that incorporate bits of detritus she’s collected. At the same time, Janet is trying to figure out why she feels caught in repeating cycles of disappointment. “I’ve always had this knowledge that I could make any man fall in love with me if I really tried,” she confesses to Lacy one night, almost without realizing she’s doing it. “I think it’s ruined my life.”

Baker has a longstanding fascination with movies — “The Flick,” perhaps her most famous play, takes place in a cinema, and she’s cited many movies among her influences. She’s directed theater as well, so perhaps it’s no surprise that her feature debut as a director feels unusually assured and confident. The graceful observations of “Janet Planet” render the two characters’ development almost imperceptible, hidden behind silences and what goes unsaid. You’ve got to lean in to catch some details: the moments framed from Lacy’s perspective, the look behind her eyes, the smile on Janet’s face. Movies are often built on moments of revelation, but in “Janet Planet” they’re more of a slow roll, a lot more like life. This summer, Janet is searching for both meaning and a means to forgetting the self, just as Lacy is starting to understand her self.

Near the end of the film, Janet discovers a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke, an excerpt from the fourth of Rilke’s mystical “Duino Elegies.” In the segment, which begins “And you, my parents, am I not right? / You who loved me for that small beginning of my love for you,” Rilke reflects on the relationship between child and parent in terms of a puppet stage, the child watching the parent moving at the behest of forces neither really understands. “O hours of childhood, / when behind each shape more that the past lay hidden, / when that which lay before us was not the future,” Rilke muses.

The poem’s lines don’t explain “Janet Planet” — it is not a movie to be explained — but they push on its edges a bit, opening out space for fresh contemplation. A childhood summer is, after all, a lot like a play. It’s self-contained; it’s full of small dramas; it’s a moment away from the routines of daily life that often leads to challenge and growth. It’s a time to find yourself, or lose yourself, in someone else’s story. And sometimes, the best thing about summer is that it does, eventually, give way to fall.

Janet Planet
Rated PG-13 for some bad words and weed. Running time: 1 hour 53 minutes. In theaters.