‘Janet Planet’ Is Too Quirky for Its Own Good

Janet Planet is a journey to a rural Western Massachusetts world of affectation, all twee decorations, eccentric knick-knacks, self-conscious silences and pauses, and torpid nostalgic drama. The directorial debut of Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Annie Baker, the film—showing at this year’s New York Film Festival—operates in a single, precious sub-Kelly Reichardt register, its every second marked by studied images, sounds, and performances. Gently quirky to the point of exasperation, it gazes daintily at yesteryear, yet the only past it makes one pine for are the two hours prior to its commencement.

Late at night at sleepaway camp, adolescent Lacy (Zoe Ziegler) sneaks out of her bunk to a payphone to call her mother Janet (Julianne Nicholson), announcing, “I’m going to kill myself…if you don’t come get me.” This is brazen manipulation and Janet knows it, but she complies and picks up her daughter, telling her “This is a bad pattern.” Upon seeing that her mom has arrived with her latest boyfriend Wayne (Will Patton), a stoic and unfriendly creep, Lacy considers, albeit to no avail. The remainder of her summer break will now be spent at her woodlands home, attending piano lessons at an older neighbor’s house, going for walks with her mom, and carefully arranging and staring at the many figurines—now including a Troll doll given to her by a camp friend—that she’s positioned on a bookshelf that’s been retrofitted to resemble a stage, replete with opening and closing curtains.

There isn’t much momentous action in Janet Planet; Baker casts her premiere feature as a languorous memory piece that’s heavy on early ’90s atmosphere. Be it Lacy sitting on a couch playing a keyboard on her lap while a fan rotates on a side table, or the girl and her mother strolling down the area’s tree-lined roads, the mood is quiet and precise in a deliberately mannered style. Baker’s compositions often position Lacy at the bottom of the frame to highlight her low-to-the-ground perspective, and they also assume her obstructed POV as she stares at adults through windows and around corners and car seats. Everything is perfectly poised and arranged in italicized fashion, and so too are its many audio elements, from the clickety-clack of a cassette tape popping into a car deck and the incessantly chirping and buzzing insects outside the characters’ abode, to the twinkly tunes of a puppet master-themed music box that’s ultimately recalled, thematically speaking, by a late poem read to Janet on a romantic picnic.

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