Janet Planet, written and directed by the Pulitzer Prize winning theater maker Annie Baker, is the best movie I’ve seen in a very long time.
Set in the summer time in the Berkshires in the 90s, it’s a deeply female movie about an over-sharing single mother, Janet, who knows how to get people to fall in love with her, and her 11-year-old daughter, Lacy, who obsessively tracks the alarming entrances and exits of her mother’s codependent partners. Annie Baker has said that the movie was about Lacy’s internal, wizard-like ways, and that Lacy vaporizes one of her mother’s suitors - but the movie read to me in almost the opposite way, like a hyper-naturalistic, closely observed tale of a child’s powerlessness.
I found subtle humor everywhere in it. Julianne Nicholson stars and is amazing and every actor in the film does a perfect job. The writing is perfect, every word, every silence, and the monologues are sublime. The sound design and score are perfect. It’s simultaneously spare and lush - one of my very favorite aesthetic textures. It gave me space to ask some big questions - what is healthy emotional intimacy between a mother and child? How much should a mother share with her child about how adults really are - and about how she really feels in her adult life? I went with a friend and our conversation afterwards was deeply moving, intimate, confessional - this is what wonderful cinema can do for people.
Even though the NY Times reviewer called it a “tiny masterpiece” it seems as though every person I tell about Janet Planet has never heard of it. I desperately want films like this to succeed commercially so that we get more of them. And so that I get to make one someday! Go to the movie theater and see this movie.
An Unlikely President
Brooke Shields is now president of Actors’ Equity? Interesting move! I applaud. What an awesome way to be of service to theater artists and learn some new skills. She’ll be able to bring attention to issues and hopefully help make theater making a more sustainable financial reality for those devoted to making it.
I liked how she answered this question from the NY Times:
NY Times: The union just announced a strike against developmental work, saying negotiations were not making progress. What’s the issue?
Brooke Shields: People aren’t being compensated fairly.
Boom! Concise.
About a decade ago, with Isaac Butler and Annie-B Parson, I organized a roundtable discussion to discuss performer pay. We assembled union leaders, performers, producers, artistic directors and philanthropic foundation leaders at my apartment to figure out what was getting in the way of paying performers fair wages. An actress at the table shared that the money she made in the cast of a show at The Public Theater 20 years ago was the same she made twenty years later. This was a moment in time when the nonprofit theaters seemed to all be building ten and twenty million dollar lobbies so it didn’t look good. It was clear that an entire arts ecosystem was being subsidized by the shitty wages accepted by performers, who were mostly working class or poor. Most foundations won’t give direct grants to performers - it’s really rare - they’re much more likely to fund institutions. Even those foundations who do give grants to individuals - visual artists, playwrights, etc - rarely rarely rarely give to actors and dancers. But a big blockage was that Actors Equity wasn’t aggressively pursuing higher wages for its members.
Anyhoo. I wish Brooke luck. Everyone benefits in a city where being an artist, a writer, a performer is financially sustainable. We’re quite far from that in New York City!
Thank you for reading and thanks especially to my paying subscribers, who keep this newsletter sustainable for me to work on!
I will leave you with this gem.
It’s July, can you believe it? Time, she’s fast.
xo Lizzie
I ached for that child, her powerlessness was palpable. Her mother, who in no way was a monster, seemed caught in a loop like an undertow which pulled her toward transient relationships with men
and women. She appeared to be present, she appeared to show kindness, but in the most fundamental care of her daughter, she was neglectful and narcissistic. It was beautifully shot and written. I want to see it again. Haunting
Going to see it today!
Time, she fast 😳