I’m on a Zoom call with Julianne Nicholson , discussing her latest film “ Janet Planet ,” when I reference a moment that made the audience at my screening collectively gush with joy and nostalgia. The central figure of playwright-turned-filmmaker Annie Baker’s directorial debut is an isolated pre-teen named Lacy. She comes of age during the early 1990s in a lush, wooded, mountainous region of Massachusetts — a time and place where long bouts of silence and observation were how you came to understand the world around you — and orbits the life of her mother, the eponymous Janet, played by Nicholson, with equal fascination and disdain.
The scene I mention to Nicholson takes place a little later in the film and sees Lacy playing by herself, with a Little Red Riding Hood doll that, when turned inside out, becomes Little Red’s Grandma, then turned again, becomes The Wolf who eats them both. As I bring it up, Nicholson’s eyes widen. “A friend of mine who’s in her 40s, wrote to me about that,” she says, amazed, but not surprised by the weight this moment carries for people.
“They had seen a screening of it and she said five women in their 40s burst into tears in recognition, like when the thing that you haven’t thought of in three decades suddenly brings you right back to a place.” There are a lot of moments like this in “Janet Planet.” Moments where the object of a scene isn’t to move from point A to point B, but to just sit and watch and find somet.
