Janet Planet

“Janet Planet” begins with 11-year-old Lacy (Zoe Ziegler) away at summer camp. Homesick, she calls her mom, Janet (Julianne Nicholson) in the middle of night, threatening to kill herself if she is not picked up and taken home. By the time Janet arrives, Lacy has changed her tune, but nope, mom says it’s too late now, she’s made her choice and they hit the road. It’s a deft introduction, encapsulating in Lacy that old adolescent feeling of angst, melodrama, and misery. It also establishes the relationship between mother and daughter as the movie’s most important, evoked in how we first see Janet in sun-dappled long shot, suggesting Lacy’s idealized view of her. Their rural western Massachusetts home undergirds a sense of isolation and dependence on one another, the two often sleeping in the same bed. Is it any wonder that Lacy refuses to board the bus when it’s time to go back to school? That moment departs from Lacy’s point-of-view, seen its own long shot, as if going back to school is an out of body experience. And so, whether the title of writer/director Annie Baker’s feature film debut was culled from an Outkast lyric, or the nickname Van Morrison gave his wife, I don’t know, in the context of “Janet Planet,” it denotes a daughter essentially gravitating in the orbit of a mom.

Lacy, though, is not the only satellite in Janet’s orbit. In what passes for plot, three different people pass in and out of mother and daughter’s lives. There is Wayne (Will Patton), Janet’s terse boyfriend, Regina (Sophie Okonedo), Janet’s old friend and an ex-hippie who is part of a commune that may or may not be a cult, and Avi (Elias Koteas), the leader of the commune or may or may not be a cult who takes interest in Janet. None stick around too long. If they bring their own annoyances or aggravations to the mix, Baker is keen to show just how much Lacy annoys and aggravates them. There might be a palpable menace in the air when Wayne lashes out at Lacy for asking him pointed personal questions despite his suffering an intense migraine, but it’s hard not to feel a little sympathy for Wayne too. Being with Lacy is a challenge, and Baker makes it as challenging for us as much as them to be so much in her prickly, possessive presence. And even if the world of “Janet Planet” is of a decided bohemian, liberal bent, no doubt Baker at least partly writing what she knows, this idea of raising a child as endurance test is an idea with which everyone can identify.

Gradually, though, Lacy drifts further and further from her mom’s orbit. If this marks “Janet Planet” as akin to a coming-of-age story, it’s notable how many of the genre’s trappings Baker eschews, like pop hits of the era for lazy hits of nostalgia. No, this movie is firmly in the present, and in Lacy’s presence, though even then, it never quite lets us all the way in. There is no voiceover to provide Lacy’s perspective, and though occasionally Baker writes dialogue that elucidates the character, she just as frequently envelopes scenes in an unsettling silence. The way Lacy watches Regina while eating an ice cream cone is a quirk or two away from full-on horror. This approach, though, means that “Janet Planet” is often enigmatic to its own detriment. It’s telling how many reviewers have relied on Baker’s explanations of ideas in interviews to fuel their own interpretations. Yet, if that inscrutability can be frustrating, it can also be freeing. Throughout, Lacy returns to a small shoebox theatre in her bedroom, arranging her figurines and then pulling the curtain closed, a profound metaphor for every child’s churning secret drama. Adults yearn for access, much like viewers of “Janet Planet” might, and Lacy is unwilling to grant it. 

The Flick

Annie Baker’s Pulitzer Prize winning play “The Flick”, which is winding down a run at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theater, where I saw it back in February, is set entirely in a rundown single screen movie theater, and opens with an overture – namely, the prelude to “The Naked and the Dead.” It heralds, as overtures do, the beginning, yet it also doubles as the end, because once it ceases the lights come up and two theater employees, Sam and Avery (Danny McCarthy and Travis Turner, respectively, in the Steppenwolf production), enter with a garbage can, brooms and dustpans, sweeping up while riffing, and sometimes not talking at all. Last year, in an interview with podcast hero Marc Maron, Baker herself described this moment “when the lights came on and the ushers came through and started shit-talking each other and sweeping up the popcorn. That transition from the magic, the time-machine of the movies into the crazy present tense...that, to me, felt so profound.”

The darkness of the movie theater, David Thomson has written, exists “so that the compulsive force of our involvement may he hidden.” When it’s dark, we feel protected within the filmed fantasy’s cocoon; when it’s suddenly bright again, we are released from the cocoon, exposed, figuratively naked. There is a reason why the most unnerving passage in all of “The Flick” doubles as the one that takes place when the lights are down and a movie is being screened, and that’s because the sacred pact of the cinema’s darkness is broken.

The rest of “The Flick” simply dispenses with the pact altogether, taking place after the lights have come up, when all the fever dreams by light of the 35mm projector have ended and all that’s left is spilled popcorn. In fact, much of “The Flick’s” is devoted to sweeping up popcorn, lengthy passages of Sam and Avery going up and down rows with brooms and dustpans doing menial work, occasionally pausing to talk shop with Rose (Caroline Neff at Steppenwolf), the projectionist, and sometimes not talking at all, simply allowing the noise of dustpans scraping against the concrete, over and over, to effect an astonishing workaday vérité. “The Flick” runs ten minutes over three hours and this is why. If infinite movies and TV shows, and whatever else, have claimed to chronicle the working day, none have so consistently, daringly and remarkably done so with this kind of authenticity.

But that length is deliberate. It draws you into the explicit mundaneness of “The Flick’s” world, becoming an ode to this kind of low-paying, un-eventful job where at-work friendships evolve and devolve, sometimes within a matter of moments, and so many conversations about nothing organically morph into being about something, or about everything, which Baker captures with an incredibly adroit ear. At one point, she has Avery recite a monologue from Quentin Tarantino's “Pulp Fiction”, giving it new meaning without appropriating it, an improbably deft trick, and the best implementation of a movie quote in any artistic context I can recall.

Above all, it is the place that defines this play. Baker could have set her story anywhere, at a dead-end retail job or a hotel lobby, but she chose a fading palace to the motion picture. In her landmark essay, The Decay of Cinema, Susan Sontag wrote of the movies’ “double start”, how the French filmmaking Lumière brothers sought to employ “cinema as the transcription of real unstaged life” while French filmmaker Georges Méliès saw “cinema as invention, artifice, illusion, fantasy.” “But,” as Sontag noted, “this is not a true opposition. The whole point is that, for those first audiences, the very transcription of the most banal reality was a fantastic experience. Cinema began in wonder, the wonder that reality can be transcribed with such immediacy.”

Anymore, movies seemed to have branched out in two polar opposites from those marvelous beginnings, seeking only to render either a fantastic experience or a banal reality, nothing in-between. Leave it to the “The Flick”, set on the stage, to capture completely the cinema’s original intention; Baker transcribes reality with such immediacy that it renders wonder.