For years now, in conversations I’ve had with friends and colleagues, the name Julianne Nicholson comes up and it’s praise and admiration all around but maddeningly little specificity from any of us about why she’s so good. After winning an Emmy as Kate Winslet’s best friend and the stealth MVP of HBO’s “Mare of Easttown,” you heard lots of vagaries along those lines. That something is crucial to the the supple debut feature from playwright-turned-screenwriter and director Annie Baker.
Now 53, Nicholson plays Janet, a Western Massachusetts woman raising her 11-year-old daughter Lacy (played by Zoe Ziegler) across a series of transitional clauses we call a life. The movie takes place in the hazy, birdsong-filled summer in 1991, as Janet bends her days in different ways around three different men, while Lacy navigates her own place on the planet of Baker’s title. What I love about “Janet Planet” is its devotion to the ambiguities filling the space between emotional extremes in any mother/daughter or parent/child relationship.
“What Julianne does so beautifully,” Baker told me, “is hard to describe because she’s doing five different things. She can hold four or five intentions at the same time as a performer. And you never know exactly what she’s thinking.
” To Baker, “that’s what real life feels like. And it’s hard to find on screen, and hard to find an actor with that kind of mysterious nuance.” I talked to Nicholson on her final day of a.
