Child’s Play By Fiona Tarses

Many of the people I’m closest to didn’t really care for Janet Planet. My parents found it too slow and quiet. My best friend, who grew up in Western Mass, found it too uncanny. But while playwright Annie Baker’s directorial debut – a quietly triumphant ode to a child’s summer – isn’t for everyone, it was one of my favorite films of the year. 

Yes, Janet Planet is slow and quiet. It’s long, heavy, sticky, and indulgent. It tells the tale of one summer in what we might assume is the town of Amherst, Massachusetts, where Baker grew up. But exact location is never really established and seldom discussed, so we could theoretically be in any New England town, or really any small town in America. The movie is, thus, the story of anyone’s summer – everyone’s summer. 

Most of Janet Planet consists of long, actionless moments. More than once we sit for an awkwardly wordless meal on the porch or a solo walk to a piano lesson. The film is never silent. The sounds of summer are pervasive throughout. There are always crickets or birds chirping loudly, depending on the time of day. Always wind chimes and sneakers trudging down a gravel road. But it is undoubtedly an example of slow cinema. A portrait of a life and all of its sounds and images, rather than a chatty masterclass in narrative storytelling. 

This makes sense. Annie Baker doesn’t need to prove to us that she is good at telling a story. She has a Pulitzer Prize and nothing to prove to anyone when it comes to dialogue and plot. So it almost makes sense that, in her pivot to film, she should try something completely different. Why shouldn’t she be delighted by a thirty second long shot of a blintz warming in the microwave or a girl lying motionless in the grass? Why shouldn’t she take full advantage of the audio and visual aspects of film that one does not have access to in the theater? As a director, Baker probably feels like a kid in a candy store, with all these new, unlimited toys at her disposal. And it’s only fitting that, in this childlike state, she would tell a story loosely based on her own upbringing. With Janet Planet, Baker does cinema. If you want to watch one of her plays, you should go do that instead. 

And yet, while this film marks a dramatic shift from her time in the theater and a prime opportunity for Baker to do all the things she once could not, she does not for a moment forget her roots. In fact, one could argue that Janet Planet is as much an ode to the theater as it is a departure from it. At the very least, the theater haunts the movie at every turn. 

One of the many repetitions in Janet Planet is the arranging and rearranging of toys on a makeshift stage. The movie begins when Lacy, a delightfully rumpled eleven year old girl played by Zoe Ziegler, calls her mother to pick her up from camp- she’s miserable, out of her element. The moment Lacy gets home, she winds up her music box, opens a tiny red curtain attached to a dresser in her room, and begins to play. Or rather, she returns to a “play” which had already begun. She adds characters to the dinner party before her. A blue haired troll, a buddha. She carefully pours juice into their porcelain tea cups. The music ends and Lacy stares down her motley cast of characters. Then she closes the curtain. A little later in the film, she puts them to bed and adds grass to her little planet, as food or foliage. She plays God or mother to a dominion of her own creation, and thus an artist is born. It’s fun to imagine that this is loosely based on Baker’s own childhood and that we really are spying on a tiny future playwright.

Lacy is a puppet master, and her mother, Janet, played by Julianne Nicholson, is also a puppet master in her own right, not only because she is an acupuncturist who sticks needles into people for a living, as if they were her very own voodoo dolls. Janet Planet, like a play, is chaptered out by acts, marked explicitly by title cards and the entrances and exits of various actors in Janet’s life. And these actors, her lovers and friends, are all actually performers, in their own ways. Wayne seems relatively normal until Lacy catches him one evening in an elaborate, naked dance. When Janet tells him to leave, she finds him outside her window, naked again, bowing, as if to worship her or simply to end the play that was their time together. Regina, who comes briefly to live with Janet and Lacy in the second act, is an old actress friend Janet re-encounters when she and Lacy attend a puppet show on a farm.

Avi, the principal of the third and final chapter, is the (cult?) leader of the same puppet troupe. “You are god, by the way,” he says to Lacy. “There’s only one I. You created the universe.” With these words, he seals his fate. One day, while Lacy is home sick from school, Janet and Avi go on a walk. We watch them from behind as they stroll through a grassy meadow. “Sometimes I feel like she’s watching me,” Janet says, in reference to Lacy. We, the audience, feel like a voyeur, doing that very thing Janet fears. Meanwhile, at home, Lacy observes her puppets, winds the music box again, and dances. Avi recites Rilke to Janet, an elegy about childhood and parents and puppets. Janet zones out and asks Avi to read it again. Lacy sits before her stage, eyes closed, focusing. It seems like she’s trying to make something happen.  “An angel has come as an actor and begin manipulating the lifeless..” he reads and then trails off. It seems he has disappeared into thin air. It seems like Lacy willed it. Maybe he fell through a trapdoor. It’s likely the editor performed a quick trick in post. Janet returns home alone. Avi ends. 

Janet knows her power. She knows she can make people, specifically these purveyors of drama, fall in love with her. She says so. She admits that she controls who comes in and out of her life. She is the voodoo master, the puppeteer, and the playwright. And yet, she also knows deep down that her arms have their own strings attached. “An angel has come as an actor, and begin manipulating the lifeless bodies of the puppets to perform. Angel and puppet! Now at last there is a play,” writes Rilke. Janet’s angel may be small and obedient and loving. She may not even know her power. But the play is hers. She gives the whole thing life and meaning. And she is always there, quietly observing. 

 When a child is born, the mother’s planet becomes theirs. As they get older and begin to separate, the planet still continues to beat for the child. Even as the mother trails off in her own direction, the child is close behind, watching, directing, haunting. Baker uses symbols of theater to help her imbue her little movie about motherhood with a powerful metaphor. Perhaps because, in a way, her plays gently haunt her, as if they were her own children. Even as she gets older, tries to shake them a little, set them free, pave her own way, there they always are. In the poetry she reads, in the movies she watches, with all their curtains and strings and elaborate gestures. Janet can shake Avi and all of her other actors, but she happens to be raising a great little theater maker of her own. The theater is in Baker’s past, but it’s in her future too, in one way or another. We just have to let her be excited about her new toys for the time being. 

The film ends with Janet and Lacy at a contra dance event. “I’m a terrible dancer,” Janet admits to a friend. “It’s not really about being good or bad,” says the friend. “It’s just a nice way to meet new people.” Lacy refuses to join in. But she watches as her mother spins and spins, like a dazzling celestial body, gleefully changing partners as she goes, excited by this new world. And Lacy just solemnly stares. Perhaps it’s a little scary to see her mother do something so bold, so separate, something she never could. Perhaps she just doesn’t feel like joining in. But they’ll go home together just the same and always belong to one another. 

And thus ends Annie Baker’s first film. A beautiful, slow, quiet foray into cinema. An ode to memory and mothers and her sticky summers growing up in Massachusetts. And a nod to the theater and all that came before and all that will always haunt us, for good.