Mother Act

Lacy’s life is dull and grey. Her main problem? She has no friends. Despite the fact that Lacy lives in a bit of a Moonrise Kingdom, playwright turned debuting director Annie Baker has no such fruity illusions about an isolated childhood summer pre-Internet in her new feature Janet Planet. The grown-up world she can nascently sense her eventual entrance into is represented by three transient friends of her mother, and though it doesn’t present horror, it doesn’t present anything worth anticipating either. The fact that that larger emotional worldsense isn’t Welcome To The Dollhouse scary nor Wes Anderson nostalgic makes for a subtle work to be sure, but it still feels uncommitted. It presents a melancholy not salient enough in which to truly luxuriate.

The film opens with a petty suicide threat that sets up the film’s deadpan comedy, which doesn’t really land very frequently. Lacy (Zoe Ziegler) must escape from camp, or else. She is indeed picked up, but discovers she now must contend with her mother, Janet’s (Julianne Nicholson), callous-if-not-cruel boyfriend Wayne. Janet eventually dismisses Wayne, as we enter a new platonic housemate, the kind but messy Regina. Regina is an interesting person who best typifies the hippie milieu of the film and her life is characterized by a commonly accompanying irresponsiblity; she’s not really a role model.

The only one who might present something worth gleaning for Lacy’s future is, interestingly, (maybe) literal cult leader Avi, whose abrupt and unexplainable exit from the film is easily its best and most haunting moment. Lacy not only has no friends, she has very little interaction with anyone besides her mom on a daily basis. Her bespeckled ginger mug is the film’s central image, meek but inquisitive, often getting no answer at all from weary adults. It’s not a conducive environment for growth, intellectual or emotional. 

For Janet’s part, she certainly shows devotion to Lacy, but the thematic meat of the film is in her trying to rediscover her own life as a single mom, and more specifically Lacy’s reaction to that. It may have done the film good to further dwell on the absent father in providing potential father figures, but neither of the men here could ever really be that. The implied Lesbian angle in Regina’s story doesn’t actually emerge either. Is the film condemning hippie disregard for the nuclear family by omission? The only time we see what Lacy is missing out on, a legitimate friendship with Wayne’s own daughter, it’s Wayne’s fault for not embracing Lacy, or rather Janet’s for allowing Lacy to persuade her to break up with him.

Childish adult choices doom the child, but not settling down is chief among them. This push-pull of needs between mother and daughter doesn’t really occur in a committed family structure, and indeed, the tryptich film structure itself underscores that. Weirdly, despite its seeming conservatism, the actual Renfair Seattle (spiritually, it literally takes place in Massachusetts) environment of the film will appeal to no conservatives whatsoever, and the film’s specificity and empathy dash hopes for a satisfying sneer. It’s like Lena Dunham without subversion.

This coming-of-age film is unconventional in that there’s nothing that can spur Lacy to actually come of age, and the film aims more to portray early stuntedness in motion. Lacy still sleeps with Janet after all, in addition to her lack of a more  precocious independence. Perhaps, though, it’s as simple as its near complete lack of music (or, worse, the chore-like treatment of Lacy’s piano lessons), which leaves the film feeling distanced. It’s tough to say the film is truly within Lacy’s perspective, let alone that she feels that way. At the same time, the lens isn’t really “objective”, but it isn’t warm and it isn’t cold towards the characters. It’s just flat, and muted beyond belief. Miradna July can do this sort of thing because she isn’t afraid of emotional nakedness. In Janet Planet, Baker recoils from it.