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So much has changed since the early ‘90s, when kids were generally left to fend for themselves. And the mother-daughter drama Janet Planet travels back to a summer in the ‘90s with a little girl who was just one of the many people caught up in her single mother’s orbit.
Janet Planet stars Zoe Ziegler as Lacy, a lonely 11-year-old who lives with her mom, acupuncturist Janet (Julianne Nicholson), in the woods of Western Massachusetts. During the summer of 1991, after Lacy calls Janet and threatens to kill herself is she’s forced to stay away at camp, they end up sharing their home with three different visitors, who are all drawn in by Janet’s strong magnetism. Everyone loves Janet. But as friends and boyfriends and cult leaders come and go from their lives (and their home), Lacy quietly watches it all from a distance.
As the summer days pass, Lacy and Janet don’t do a whole lot. They spend a day at the mall with Janet’s boyfriend, Wayne (Will Patton), and his daughter. And they go to a performance at a communal farm, where Janet reconnects with an old friend. Mostly, though, their summer is quiet and rather meandering—and the aimlessness of it all often makes the pacing drag.
As it turns out, Lacy and Janet are both incredibly lonely people. But while Lacy spends her time at home (unless she’s trudging off to the neighbor’s house for her piano lesson), without a single friend to play with, Janet surrounds herself with people. There’s always someone who needs her help or her comfort or just a place to stay—who wants to talk late into the night about their trauma or their deep, meaningful (and generally pretentious) thoughts on the universe. But, in the end, they just seem to drain Janet’s energy before they move on, leaving her to fill the void with someone new—instead of turning her attention to her quiet, friendless daughter.
Though Zoe Ziegler is awkwardly adorable as Lacy, you can’t help but feel sorry for this poor, lonely kid—and frustrated with Janet, who’s so caught up in her own quest to find love that she leaves her child alone, time and time again. And while the film offers an intriguing look at these two characters and their own kind of loneliness, it all feels strangely beautiful but still rather flat.
While everyone seems to be drawn to Janet, viewers may find her more maddening than magnetic. And something about her general lack of direction makes this understated drama feel long and somewhat tiresome.
You can enter Janet’s orbit when Janet Planet expands to select theaters on June 28, 2024.
Listen to the review on Reel Discovery:
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