She's got the whole world in her hands
dir: Annie Baker
2024
The hint, to me, was how loud the sounds of nature are, at all times, around the Janet of the film’s title and her daughter, throughout the film. No matter where they are, the sounds of insects and birds, and other creatures, permeate every scene.
There is some music in the flick, but it’s all diegetic (as in, playing within the movie, not as a soundtrack that the characters aren’t hearing).
It’s one long summer, an endless summer, in someone’s life. That someone is not the someone referred to in the title of the film, but maybe it is?
Lacy (Zoe Ziegler) calls her mother from summer camp, telling her she’s going to kill herself if she’s not picked up.
She’s about eleven years old, I think. By the time the mother comes to collect her, Lacy has changed her mind and wants to stay, but tis too late.
And thus ensues the depiction of their enmeshed, co-dependent relationship over the course of that summer. I don’t think it’s unintended, or a lot of a stretch, or too unfair to say that Lacy seems really fucking annoying.
I’m sure deep down she’s a good kid, who maybe grew up to be less of a pill. But at that age, she was a clingy pill who made her mother’s life hell, based on this flick. And maybe I’m assuming too much, but I get the feeling the character is probably an extreme, extrapolated version of herself that the writer / director remembers or imagines about herself. Maybe. In which case what she remembers, or artistically renders about her mother also has meaning for her, and hopefully us.
But that’s not the point of the story. The mum, the Janet of the title (the great Julianne Nicholson), never speaks harshly to her daughter, never expresses the frustration or impatience we think she must feel towards her, which is to her credit, and it’s kind of miraculous. I would not have been that saintly, but then I’ve never been accused of being a good parent.
She knows that Lacy and her being so enmeshed does neither of them good, to the point where Lacy wants to sleep not only next to her mother but touching her face at the same time. But she doesn’t push her away. When her mother wants to go sleep in her own bed, Lacy begs for a piece of her to hold, in order to be able to sleep.
She gives her a hair from her head, and the daughter cradles it like it’s something precious.
Maybe this all sounds disconcerting to you, if you haven’t seen it, or if I’m not describing it properly. It didn’t feel that way, watching it. It not sweet, or sentimentalised. It’s kind of languorous, which is befitting, considering the feel of a long, hot rural summer (the whole flick is mostly set in rural Massachusetts, I have no idea when, but it predates mobiles, certainly, and all the cars are very boxy). And the closeness between mother and daughter, and even the clinginess, aren’t depicted in a negative light. It’s close, stifling, but somewhat comforting, even if it’s what an outsider could callously call “unhealthy”.
That’s another point reiterated throughout the flick: what the fuck should other people’s opinions matter anyway? Janet has lived her life, is living her life. She has been in relationships. She is a single mum bringing up her daughter the best she can. She is not neglectful, on the contrary, she is very much there for her kid, perhaps she’s even too present and too understanding (again, a useless judgement from external people with opinions).
She has relationships with people, and the film is broken into three sections, somewhat based on the idea that each of these people represented something to both Janet and Lacy. The first involves Wayne (Will Patton), who’s older than Janet, and something of a crazy coot. It’s not necessarily that he does anything that wrong, but Lacy dislikes him and wants him gone, and he doesn’t seem to want Lacy around, at one point, during an alleged migraine episode, demands that she absent herself from his presence.
During that scene, though, Lacy is being so fucking deliberately annoying that any person would beg for her not to be present. It’s not fair to say that she seems to be goading Wayne into flipping out, because she’s a kid, and we’re not meant to attribute such motivations to kids so young. But it would also be delusional of me to ignore that Lacy essentially gets exactly what she wants: her mother to herself.
After booting Wayne, but not before she is briefly befriended by Wayne’s daughter Sequoia, the only time we see Lacy happy with a kid her age is in that brief section; all the more powerful and exciting because it’s so brief. For only a day Lacy sees what it would be like if she was able to be friends with kids her own age.
And then reverts exactly back to type: surveilling her mother at every opportunity, and preferring her company to that of anyone else. They both attend a performance of some type in an area even more rural than where they live, put on by a troupe / cult, at which Janet recognises one of the performers, being Regina (Sophie Okonedo). Thus this next section is named after her.
Regina was friends with Janet back in the day, and needs somewhere to stay since she’s broken up either with her cult or with her ‘boyfriend’, which amounts to the same thing. They don’t seem to have much connecting them, but at least Lacy doesn’t hate her guts, and likes using her shampoo.
There’s a very random nature to what happens between Regina and Janet, and I don’t know if a sexual or romantic previous relationship is implied, but there’s certainly a resentment there. Out of nowhere, unless it’s just a reiteration of what they used to do together back in the day, they take drugs and then start ranting low-key at each other.
Regina, who used to be in and will eventually be back in a cult, somehow likes to judge Janet, in ways that Janet doesn’t appreciate, and it mostly revolves around telling anyone who will listen, including Lacy, that Janet has bad taste in men and relentlessly makes ‘bad choices’. It’s said multiple times, so it’s taken as a given.
And we, in the world outside of this film, may repeat the same idea, the same judgement about people we know or friends, co-workers, cousins, complete strangers etc. But what does it even fucking mean? Many of us in this life don’t choose shit, let alone who we end up in relationships with. Yes, yes I know we’re all responsible for our actions otherwise we’re selfish pricks who pretend we had no choice in doing the terrible things we did.
But maybe people stumble through life without much of any plan, and people occasionally show some interest in us and stick around for a while, or show little interest in us, and stick around to torment us intermittently, and little of it has to do with “choices”, bad or otherwise. Janet pushes back, with not necessarily the most rhetorically convincing of arguments, and pretty much wipes Regina out for her troubles, and for her need to put Janet down. Janet doesn’t need that negativity around, especially since she has Lacy to deliver a constant stream of it. No need to double up.
There are these supposedly candid moments between Lacy and Janet that, in a different flick would be played for comedy. Obviously, they’re not, here. Lacy is not a precocious, genius child with the solution to everyone’s problems and some quirky foibles. She is a fearful and unpleasant child fixated on her mother because no-one else will do, and she’s crippled with self-consciousness, terrified of the judgement of other kids.
But there was something, something perhaps off kilter but nonetheless powerful when she states that most of the time her anxiousness makes most moments a living hell, and instead of trying to talk her out of it, or to convince her it’s only temporary, Janet also confesses that she’s pretty unhappy most of the time.
We expect characters to have character arcs, to learn things and come to terms with things. We’ve been programmed that way. When characters confess to be unhappy, and no easy solution is offered or taken, and nothing changes, it’s a bit (mildly) shocking.
It’s almost like they’re people.
When the summer ends, as it inevitably must, in the States that means the smell of Fall and returning to school. In Lacy’s case that means starting what they call “middle school”, which she flatly refuses to do, lying on the ground where the school bus is meant to pick her up, feigning death or something similarly debilitating.
Around the same time (her mother goes along with the charade that Lacy is actually unwell, and promises / threatens to get her some antibiotics, despite being afraid of them), the leader of the cult starts hitting on Janet, wanting to spend time with her. Avi (the great Canadian actor Elias Koteas) may lead a cult, but like all cult leaders, he thrives on new worshippers, new devotees. He is interested in either having some kind of relationship with Janet, or brainwashing her, which depending on the person amounts to the same thing. He doesn’t give her the hard sell, though, restraining himself to explaining his philosophy (which doesn’t sound that different from non-duality), and in one strange instance reads her some poetry.
I call this bit strange because something not quite clear happens during that scene, where Janet and Avi are picnicking beneath an enormous tree (the shot composition is exquisite, especially the way the camera “tricks” us despite the dialogue), as Avi reads a beautiful poem in the voice of someone talking to their parents as being his first love, and it’s all remarkably well done, but ends on a mysterious note (for me), implying either a time jump or an imagined conversation, or a recalled one.
Either way, Janet seems resigned to the fact that relationships with other people while Lacy is so young will always be fraught, but there’s also the massive, palpable relief when Lacy actually goes to school, implying that maybe they’ll both grow over time.
To a nervous parent (like me), this is the equivalent of any flick where a bomb is disarmed with seconds to spare, or someone is saved at the last possible minute, or the person running to the airport gets there just in the nick of time to stop the person they didn’t realise they loved and who loved them from flying away forever.
Except the feeling is just one of enormous relief, and the growing hope that maybe our futures aren’t set in stone, and maybe we do change (not by choice, but somehow for the ‘better’) given enough time, and that things might get easier one day.
This is not a flick most audiences would like or get something from. It’s got a very narrow bandwidth. Not much happens, and yet it still goes for two hours. It’s not about big speeches or big emotions. And yet the performances are perfect for the material, Julianne Nicholson especially, but then she’s magnificent in everything she does.
I thoroughly enjoyed it, but it’s very particular and very deliberately sparse.
8 times the significance of the name is never explicitly explained either which is good out of 10
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“I've always had this knowledge that I could make any man fall in love with me if I really tried. I think it's ruined my life.” – a bit of self-knowledge can be a terrible thing - Janet Planet
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