There's some quietly ferocious, fiercely expressive dialogue in the playwright Annie Baker's first feature, "Janet Planet," and several moments of imaginative sublimity. The movie is a passionate and finely nuanced view of the tense and powerful bond between a mother and a daughter who are living together in relative isolation.
"Janet Planet" is a playwright's movie, written sharply and precisely, psychologically parsed with clean lines and exact ideas, and performed with amply displayed skill and commitment. As admirable as some of the onscreen talk is, it's mainly just delivered, along with the intentions and meanings that it contains; its precision leaves little overflow, little room for observation, little scope for imagination beyond the intimate purview of the story.
"Janet Planet" is set in the summer of 1991, in western Massachusetts, where Baker grew up. There, an eleven-year-old girl, Lacy (Zoe Ziegler), is away at summer camp and melodramatically demands that her mother, Janet (Julianne Nicholson), bring her home.
Lacy and Janet live in a rural home, which they share with Janet's boyfriend, Wayne (Will Patton), who's crusty and older. Back home, Lacy falls into familiar rounds-she plays with a mini-theatre of figurines behind curtains on a bookshelf and takes piano lessons.
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