Janet Planet review – playwright Annie Baker’s delicate debut film

The first shot of Janet Planet, like much of the Pulitzer prize-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.

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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.

And that, by nature of Lacy’s blooming attention during an impressible period of her life, these details are inherently meaningful. The camera divides its time between Lacy’s inchoate point of view – piecemeal, focused, strange – and on her small mantle in the world: stomping up the road to piano lessons, observing from the backseat of a car, peering out the upstairs window of her and Janet’s idyllic woodland house. The film is less a story, in the conventional sense, than a series of chronological, impressive vignettes that impart the curiosity and remoteness of childhood, packed with finely observed period detail. (A trip to the local mall is especially convincing.)

The chapters are delineated by interlopers into Janet and Lacy’s co-dependent world: first Wayne (Elias Koteas), Janet’s gruff live-in boyfriend, then an old friend Regina (Sophie Okonedo), then a self-fashioned New Age mystic named Avi (Will Patton). The scenes, like memory, are loose and barely tethered. They skip detail to detail, marked by their power to imprint – her mother’s earring, holding hands in the night, the brush of wind chimes as Janet, an acupuncturist, sticks Wayne with needles. The film’s greatest dramatic height and volume are quickly resolved side notes – the discovery of a tick on Lacy’s scalp and its massacre, a migraine that reveals Wayne’s distaste for her inquisitiveness.

The adults go about their complicated, fraught routines and ruptures, their foibles primarily contained by Nicholson’s finely restrained performance. Lacy, whom Ziegler plays as dry and detached, her default expression a beaked frown, observes. “You know what’s funny? Every moment of my life is hell,” Lacy tells her mother with a completely straight face, at once dead serious and sanguine. She expects it to pass.

Janet Planet is a welcome rebuttal to the dominant modes of popular art – the trauma plot, or our overemphasis on narrative – if not always the most compelling to actually watch. The film feels, at times, too enamored with its framing, both its doll house of characters and Lacy’s own play set. Much of childhood, particularly one like Lacy’s is droll and uneventful, waiting for life to start. It is a testament to Baker’s skill as a writer and director that she conjures it, and also an impediment to staying fully invested for the extent of the film’s at time sagging, nearly two-hour runtime. The first half of the film, perhaps in an effort to re-attune the senses to the mundane, withholds much dialogue, to the point of feeling implausible and inaccessible; it is a relief when Janet is supplied words in the latter half, as Nicholson rends plenty of everyday, recognizable heartache out of a slow, halting late-night confession.

That’s as intense and dramatic, in the way that we expect movies to be, that Janet Planet gets. Such is life – not always the most interesting, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t beautiful. You never know what will stick with you, but I expect some of this film will.

• Janet Planet is screening at the New York film festival with a release date yet to be announced