Janet Planet (2023)
Directed by Annie Baker
"It can be really hard to make yourself understood to someone you’re close to, and maybe that’s why we rely on mothers to help translate us. Or to translate the world to us."
Annie Baker’s Janet Planet, unsurprisingly, had me thinking of my mother. My mother has been on my mind a lot over the last few months, and disappointingly, it’s for all the wrong reasons. With my recent engagement and preparing for a wedding, I’ve had to reflect on my own family. Comparisons, whether I want to make them or not, are made and all I can see are my own deficiencies. A mother and father who aren’t there. A mother and father that don’t want to be there. Whether it’s the movies or fictions that have distorted my perception, I see a wedding as a melding of two families, extending the scope of perspectives and experiences. The union goes beyond husband and wife. I should be grateful to be welcomed by my partner’s family, but ultimately the sting of never feeling at home with my own mother and father has no balm.
Janet Planet begins with Lacy (Zoe Ziegler) at summer camp. It’s dark out and she places a collect call. Here, she says she’s going to kill herself unless her mother picks her up. And so begins the opening credits, where we’re in Lacy’s orbit, examining the world around her in the summer between fifth and sixth grade. Set in 1991 rural Massachusetts, Baker’s film, shot by Maria von Hausswolff (Godland), is gorgeously textured, hued in auburns and muted verdant greens. The film’s nostalgic glow is all-encompassing, as we follow Lacy and her mother Janet (Julianne Nicholson) during a formative summer; a summer where Lacy may finally see the world translated to her, for the first time.
When I was an undergrad, I eked out a living the best way I knew how but it was a profound struggle. My aunt and uncle rented out a space for me near Loyola, but with it came strings that they were inclined to tug at, violently. There was a lot expected of me. I worked a menial, albeit well-paying job in Arlington Heights. I’d drive 25 miles in the early morning, clock in for a few hours, clock out, and drive back to make it to class. Lather, rinse, and repeat. Stuck in I-90 traffic, I remember my cheap, rusted, tan Toyota Corolla (with its sick spoiler) dying from a leaking radiator on the highway near a toll station.I had to wait over an hour for a tow truck as I’d go through the flashcards I made for a bio test that I was surely going to miss. My life had no breathing room and I just remember going to my mother at the time and asking her for help. Not for money, exactly, but I did want to see a therapist. She scoffed at the idea. My car, my apartment, my education. None of it was fronted by my parents. I needed this from them. Given the litany of self-perceived slights, this one act of rejection honestly hurt the most. It was me at my most despondent (at the time; the bottom has given out several times over throughout my life) and vulnerable and I wasn’t being taken seriously. My first of three suicide attempts happened a few months after this event.
I only have a passing familiarity with Baker’s theatrical work prior (I saw The Flick at the Steppenwolf many years ago) but Janet Planet marks a clear departure for the dramatist, if only for the stunning aural and visual qualities of the film. It’s cinematic in a way that cannot be understated, despite the fact the film is rooted in pronouncements and discoveries stripped of histrionics. It’s a quiet film, sure, but the moments Baker, Ziegler, and Nicholson capture are positively rapturous. Divided into three acts, Baker examines Lacy and Janet’s relationships with the outside world. The first act involves Wayne (Will Patton), Janet’s boyfriend. He’s a stoic male figure with a family of his own who finds himself on the outs after a violent outburst. The second involves one of Janet’s old friends Regina (Sophie Okonedo), whose involvement in a cult leads to the third act involving Avi (Elias Koteas), the cult’s leader. You’d imagine an A24 film involving cults would inspire something sinister, but Janet Planet is decidedly low-key about these developments. Instead, we observe these moving parts through Lacy’s adolescence, occuring outside of her zone of loneliness.
I’d see my mother again after about 8 years. This was following my second suicide attempt, where I stayed at the psych ward for nearly a week. I’ll never forget how she looked. Her hair was gray, her face fuller and red from the winter cold. After keeping my parents out of my life, I let them back in, incrementally. It was difficult and I soon came to realize that as much as I’ve changed, there wasn’t much change in them. So I kept them at arm's length, knowing full well that with that distance I was bound to come under pressure. We’d have our disagreements and squabbles, but it mounted again when I asked for an apology. It was an all-encompassing apology, a request to acknowledge the past and in doing so, the resentment that I had buried within me could maybe be put to rest. But like with all things involving saying sorry in my family, the request was met with conditional clauses and more agonizing defeat. My parents won’t be attending my wedding and the overarching feeling I have is complex. There’s relief. There’s disappointment. And there’s envy. Envy for something I never had: a family.
My favorite scene in Janet Planet involves Lacy asking her mom about what she’d think if she dated a girl. The conversation here, which spills over into a confession, is precisely the kind of open, communicative, and thoughtful dialogue that I’d wish I’d have with my parents. A conversation free of judgment, where I feel like I could get a sense of the interior lives of the adult that’s supposed to care for me. The film ends on a poignant note, one where the shy Lacy observes her mother dancing, and with it comes the proud acknowledgement of the world as a haven for happiness. In watching her mother Janet dance, Lacy sees a woman who has fought her interior battles and comes out striving for life’s joys.
When I was a little boy, before my brother was born, I’d sometimes crawl under the living room furniture and observe my parents in the kitchen. It was my hiding space. My father often worked the night shift and my mother would make him a meal. On a rare evening, my mother had guests from Poland over and they were sitting at the kitchen table, talking. The conversation I overheard wasn’t intended for me, but my mother discussed her unhappiness and personal struggles. She was unfulfilled and her friends tried to hoist her out of her despair. She thought that her life was small. They tried to broaden her perspective, citing me as an accomplishment. But it seemed to have no merit or impact on her sadness. That permanently shaped the way I saw my mother from then on. It’s how I still see her, frankly. And maybe that’s the greatest piece of genetic material that she’s passed on to me; to see the world as a sad state of affairs and personal slights. But it’s not a thought process that I want shared. I may have observed the world through my mother’s perspective, but it was her translation. And now, the language in which I see things is significantly different. There are whole libraries I could occupy on my relationship to my parents, and especially my mother, but thankfully, they’re no longer shaping the way I look at the world. No, they’re stored in an antiquated section of the memory museum, and it’s a place filled with cobwebs and left dark and dingy. It’s a place I don’t care to visit again anytime soon.