What is it with annoying mother-daughter movies this year? We stuck it out for the execrable "Tuesday" a few months ago. But we were not as patient with "Janet Planet," a tedious tale of maternal melancholy told through the perspective of the nerdy tween daughter, an obvious avatar of first-time filmmaker Annie Baker.
We waited a half hour for a plot to develop, and it just never materialized. When tween Lacy (Zoe Ziegler) went to a bread-and-puppet show with her mother, Janet (Julianne Nicholson), and the hippie-dippy performance droned on for a minute or two, it was time to bail out. Before then, Baker was meticulously trying to craft a relationship between friendless Lacy and her depressed mother who is in a dead-end relationship with a monosyllabic cipher named Wayne. Janet likes to lie in bed with her daughter to help Lacy fall asleep, and it presents an opportunity for Janet to inappropriately whine about her unhappiness to an unhappy, though highly clever, girl.
Lacy dominates the first half hour, and there just is not enough narrative to sustain the film. Her best shot at having a friend comes when Wayne's daughter joins one of their outings, but it's obvious that Wayne will get the boot soon, and so too will go the daughter. We are forced to watch Lacy entertain herself with nerdy pursuits. For some reason we have to watch her practice the keyboards three separate times -- in extended sequences that grow more and more annoying. We also have to tolerate Lacy being annoying to Wayne when he is suffering from a migraine, and it's not clear whether he's supposed to be seen as a jerk for not wanting Lacy to keep pelting him with questions when it's obvious that she should know better.
Baker takes a molasses-like approach to her scenes, in no hurry to bring this in at much less than two hours. If I'm going to watch a mother and daughter mope around, it would be advisable to start developing the plot in the first 20 minutes or so. Otherwise, it's just your old '90s diary performed as rural hippie theater.
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