In defending his composition 4’33” against audiences who didn’t see the value in extended silence as a form of music, John Cage famously insisted, “There’s no such thing as silence. What they thought was silence, because they didn’t know how to listen, was full of accidental sounds.”
Playwright Annie Baker has built a career out of this concept of silence as a living, breathing thing, a state that isn’t defined by absence but by a heightening of everything around it. In reading her early play The Aliens, you can barely get past the character list on the first page before you hit stage directions that state, “At least a third—if not half—of this play is silence,” and the few mixed reviews of her three-hour, three-character, Pulitzer-winning play The Flick were often fixated on the idea that the play would be more digestible if there weren’t so many drawn out pauses between the dialogue.
Baker’s film debut Janet Planetabout a young girl in possessive love with her mom, is unsurprisingly preoccupied with the sounds of silence and the in-between moments of life in which nothing seems to be happening but everything is quietly shifting. When we enter 11-year-old Lacy’s (Zoe Ziegler) insular world, she’s running across a grassy hill toward a cabin, and for nearly two minutes, we hear nothing but the sounds of crickets and birds distantly chirping. The serenity is cut short when she dials the phone in the cabin and calmly says, “I’m going to kill myself. I’m going to kill myself if you don’t pick me up.” Enter Janet (Julianne Nicholson), Lacy’s new agey single mother, swooping in the next morning to drive her home early from summer camp.
In keeping with the film’s title—which doubles as the name of Janet’s acupuncture practice—Lacy is in her mother’s orbit 24 hours a day. Over the course of a sweaty western Massachusetts summer, when time seems to stretch and condense in the way it always does when you’re a child, Lacy competes for her mother’s attention as three other figures enter and exit their quiet lives as if through a revolving door: Janet’s gruff new boyfriend, Wayne (Will Patton); her old friend Regina (Sophie Okonedo); and a charismatic, vaguely cultish theater director named Avi (a career-best Elias Koteas). Janet has the problem of being too easy to love—she confides to Lacy that she’s never felt beautiful but has always had the power to make people fall in love with her, and it’s ruined her life because she keeps letting in the wrong people. The two of them lean on each other throughout the summer, as their bond changes and Lacy is confronted with her mom’s fallibility and limitations.
Very few of the details of Lacy’s childhood line up with my own (like her, I did call my mom to take me home early from sleepaway camp in the summer before sixth grade, but I failed because I wasn’t clever enough to use suicide threats as a bargaining tool), yet there’s an intimacy and microscopic attention to detail in the movie that seems to get at some universal experience of a lonely summer vacation surrounded by adults. I recognized the ice cream stains on oversized T-shirts, the way the light feels in your piano teacher’s house, the unarticulated feeling in those years just before young adulthood that your parents are the closest thing in your life to God.
That spirituality, which is rarely called attention to but bleeds into every loaded pause and ray of light onscreen, feels like the key to pinning down what’s so emotionally cutting about Janet Planet. Baker brought up in a Lincoln Center Q&A last fall that she worked closely with Swedish cinematographer Maria von Hausswolff to figure out where God is situated in each shot. It sounds abstract (and incredibly Scandinavian) on paper, but it lines up perfectly with the warm, almost loving way the camera watches these characters. “A lot of God is in the sound” too, she says in the same Q&A. Before filming began, sound designer Paul Hsu installed a microphone in the forest surrounding Janet’s home and left it to record for two uninterrupted weeks, and together with Baker he constructed the film’s dense sonic environment from that extended recording. There’s no score, so in the long gaps between dialogue, this wall of nature surrounds the characters like an unseen force.
Janet Planet
PG-13, 113 mins. Wide release in theaters
What makes it all so immediately, extraordinarily, call-your-mom-in-tears special, though, is the bond between Nicholson and Ziegler onscreen. Ziegler is an untrained actor Baker discovered in the eleventh hour of the casting process, and her unselfconscious performance immediately vaults her into the pantheon of great child performances in film. She plays Lacy as full of contradictions: curious and wise, blunt and naive, vulnerable and assertive. Her dynamic with Nicholson onscreen gives the impression they’ve known each other her entire life instead of just a few months. There’s a mutual understanding between Lacy and Janet that their relationship can’t stay this close forever, no matter how hard they hold on, and in all of their late-night talks and shared silences, they’re implicitly comforting each other through this transition.
“You know what’s funny? Every moment of my life is hell,” Lacy tells her mom at one point. “I don’t think it’ll last, though.”
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