Janet Plan­et – first-look review

There is a sec­ond Mass­a­chu­setts, nes­tled in the woods a cou­ple of hours inland from the Ivy League and the sand-and-grav­el dirt­bags so often entrust­ed to car­ry the state’s ban­ner onscreen. Ori­ent­ed around a clus­ter of hum­bler lib­er­al arts col­leges fos­ter­ing a chilled-out ambi­ence beyond their cam­pus­es, an enclave of aging, free-spir­it­ed, post-hip­pie boomers has tak­en shape, their men­tal­i­ty nev­er more coher­ent­ly cod­i­fied than dur­ing the up-with-peo­ple ​‘90s. It wasn’t that long ago: Free Tibet bumper stick­ers, unshaven legs, Kokopel­li paja­mas, farm­stand give­aways of sur­plus zuc­chi­ni, big talk about unshack­ling con­scious­ness from the stric­tures placed on it by our sti­fling, self-destruc­tive society.

Play­wright-turned-film­mak­er Annie Bak­er sit­u­ates her debut fea­ture in this pock­et of cul­ture, one she knows all too well for hav­ing watched it from waist lev­el as a child no old­er than pre­teen Lacy (the innate­ly hilar­i­ous, faint­ly avian, alto­geth­er mag­nif­i­cent Zoe Ziegler). Those mark­ers of set­ting come from an inti­mate mem­o­ry bank, though unlike the zeit­geist objects pinned to Lacy — bars of Sculpy-brand clay, a Babysitter’s Club paper­back, a tufty-haired Troll doll, the theme song from Claris­sa Explains It All, the gib­ber­ish lan­guage Ubbi Dub­bi pop­u­lar­ized by the Boston-pro­duced kid­die show Zoom — they sig­ni­fy more than place­ment in a spe­cif­ic time, each one a chal­lenge to polit­i­cal con­vic­tions occu­pied with per­form­ing hol­low, glob­al­ly-mind­ed virtue over the sim­ple decen­cy of doing right by those clos­est to you.

Lacy makes for a win­ning, dead­pan point of entry for this lit­tle world, intro­duced flat­ly declar­ing over the phone that she’s going to kill her­self if her moth­er won’t come get her from camp. But acupunc­tur­ist and sin­gle mom Janet (Julianne Nichol­son, aston­ish­ing) has a life of her own, as she sam­ples a few roman­tic part­ners — and with them, alter­nate ver­sions of her­self — over the sum­mer before Lacy starts sixth grade. The terse, quick-to-anger Wayne (Will Pat­ton) is a guy’s guy too close to nor­ma­tive hege­mo­ny; Regi­na (Sophie Okone­do) offers a dras­tic alter­na­tive in her woo-woo ten­den­cies, which ulti­mate­ly mask a cer­tain solip­sism that places a high­er pre­mi­um on abstract good­ness than imme­di­ate com­pas­sion; in turns wise and pseudo‑, Avi (Elias Koteas, reaf­firm­ing his great­ness after a decade on the outs) drifts into and out of Janet’s orbit as if allow­ing brief vis­i­ta­tion in his universe.

In romance as in chil­drea­r­ing, Janet fig­ures out which of the old ways she’d rather dis­pose of and which she finds worth­while enough to keep, con­sid­er­ing the use­ful­ness of antibi­otics while reject­ing the bar­ri­er of pro­tec­tive for­mal­i­ty so many par­ents put up around their off­spring. She speaks to her daugh­ter as an equal, and the final scene’s poignant POV shots of Lacy watch­ing her moth­er pass from one dance part­ner to anoth­er ask what effect that no-fil­ter frank­ness could have on the girl’s devel­op­ment. Ziegler’s coy part­ing smile sug­gests some­thing encour­ag­ing, that blaz­ing one’s own path is reward­ed with lib­er­a­tion even when the route can be con­fus­ing, lone­ly, or difficult.

Per­haps the most pre­dic­tive image is that of lit­tle Lacy pros­trate before a prosce­ni­um, a future dra­maturg heed­ing the call of her des­tiny. Though there’s always been more than a hint of the cin­e­mat­ic in Baker’s the­atre career, which brought her a Pulitzer for a play about a small-town movie house almost per­fect­ly equidis­tant between Boston and Janet Plan­et coun­try. She re-arrives ful­ly formed as a film artist, with a devel­oped and stun­ning­ly self-assured visu­al lan­guage bol­stered by unhur­ried con­fi­dence behind the cam­era. This is not just one of the great films of its year, but one of the finest first films in the annals of the medium.