FLICKERS

Review: Janet Planet

JANET PLANET

By Chuck Wilson

The remarkable mother-daughter drama Janet Planet opens with a wonderfully staged comic moment. It is late at night in the Massachusetts countryside, circa 1991, and a redheaded girl in round glasses runs from a trailer to a nearby barn and makes a call on the wall-mounted payphone. Punching the keypad with the focused awkwardness of a child, the 11-year-old Lacy (miraculous newcomer Zoe Ziegler) threatens to take her own life if the person on the other end of the line doesn’t come to get her, posthaste.

The next day, Lacy changes her mind, but her mother, Janet (Julianne Nicholson), has already arrived to save her daughter from summer camp. “This is a bad pattern,” Janet says when Lacy begs to stay. In all families, no doubt, there are bad patterns at play, but for Janet, a single mother, and Lacy, an only child, patterns that might be deemed unhealthy (or, to put it more kindly, ill-advised) are retained by first-time writer/director Annie Baker for the audience to glean. A Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright (The Flick), Baker pulls us deep into the quotidian details of Janet and Lacey’s world, where long summer walks, hours lost to dollhouse play, and whispered bedtime conversations cover deep currents of feeling. 

Baker structures her film around titled sections devoted to three visitors to Janet and Lacy’s splendid, woods-surrounded home, beginning with Wayne (Will Patton), Janet’s new live-in boyfriend. Much older than Janet, the cranky Wayne barely speaks, and doesn’t appear too happy to see Lacy returning early from camp. They both want the same thing: to have Janet for themselves.

Janet and Lacy still sleep side by side, with Lacy cupping her hand against her mother’s cheek as she likely did when she was a toddler. Wayne, Janet tells Lacy, doesn’t approve of this arrangement; maybe bunking with Lacy was a way for Janet to avoid intimacy with him. The screenplay skimps on Janet’s motivations for just about everything, frustratingly so at times. Yet the mystery of what she wants and needs is the engine that drives the film, even if there is the suggestion, by the movie’s end, that the mystery is starting to wear thin for her daughter.

Lacy spends an afternoon with Wayne’s daughter — they go running through a mall at top speed. The sequence is vibrantly photographed by Swedish cinematographer Maria von Hausswolff, energizing the film but also making us wish, in vain, for more such friends for Lacy. She’s not a kid who runs much. Instead, she spends her time practicing piano on a lap keyboard and tending to the figurines in her dollhouse, some repurposed from salt and pepper shakers. She pours drinks for them from an empty juice box. Like many bookish children, Lacy is most like a kid when she’s alone in her room. She’d host excellent sleepovers.

Near the end of the film, Janet swirls around a dance floor with a series of partners at a local contra dance. No one partner lasts for long, and it could be said that the three guests who move through her house over the course of the movie are much the same — they’re in on a pass. And so it is that Wayne exits (“End Wayne,” as the title card reads), making room for Regina (Sophie Okonedo), an old friend who’s been living on a counterculture-style arts collective/farm as the romantic partner to the group’s leader, Avi (Elias Koteas). After an afternoon theater piece, which might once been called avant-garde, Lacy witnesses Regina weeping to Janet about something or someone (Avi, we assume), and soon, Regina has moved in.

Okonedo, a renowned stage actress best known to movie audiences for her Oscar-nominated work in Hotel Rwanda, presents Regina as a counterbalance to Janet — she wears her heart on her sleeve. Some days that heart is a bit brittle, which will be her undoing with Janet, but there is space in there for others. In a marvelous car scene, Regina’s attention prompts Lacy to express her loneliness, and Lacy suddenly looks so very tired. But the scene is funny, too, because she and Regina agree: Janet has lousy taste in men.  

Once Regina departs, Avi enters, and Janet Planet droops. Guru or cult leader, he’s an energy zapper, and his presence raises more questions than Baker’s elliptical story structure can answer. But let’s forgive her, because once Avi fades from the tale, the filmmaker re-centers her camera on Lacy. She’s sitting in a chair at the county dance, her eyes locked on her mother, who’s across the room smiling happily as she dances with a succession of friends and strangers, oblivious to the fact that her daughter is realizing she’s seen this dance before. ❖

 

Review: Camp Snoopy

CAMP SNOOPY
by Chuck Wilson

Everything I know about summer camp I learned at the movies … and now from Camp Snoopy, the delightful new Apple TV series created, in part, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Peanuts’ universe’s Beagle Scouts. Snoopy’s round-headed pal, Charlie Brown, is, of course, an old hand at summer camp fun (and its emotional complexities). He’s been going there since June 5, 1965, the day the late cartoonist Charles M. Schulz first placed a forlorn Charlie Brown at a bus window as it drove him away from home. In a follow-up strip, Charlie Brown wrote a letter home, saying, “My first day of camp is over. I lived through it.” 

In the first of the 13 20-minute Camp Snoopy episodes, all directed by Rob Boutilier, Snoopy, wearing his green Beagle Scout troop leader hat (with a yellow paw print as its center emblem), comes into the kitchen where Charlie Brown is preparing his little sister, Sally, for her first camp summer. Suddenly, the telephone rings. It’s Beagle Scout Headquarters with distressing news. Snoopy’s troop is on the verge of being kicked out for not having earned enough performance badges. Snoopy sputters in outrage but then does some quick arithmetic to calculate how many badges his troop has earned: 5 + (-5) = 0. To attain the necessary badges, Snoopy’s five-bird troop, which includes Woodstock, hurriedly prepares their own trip to Spring Lake. Charlie Brown and Sally take a bus. Snoopy calls a taxi. 

This might be the moment to say that Spring Lake and the mountains that surround it have never been so artfully rendered. The Peanuts gang went to camp in some of the 1970s-era feature films and TV specials, but the color palettes of yesteryear pale considerably against the sweet vibrance of Camp Snoopy. The daytime skies over the camp are pastel-blue and the verdant landscape below is darkened with a marker, as Schulz himself might do. At night, the moon shining down on the tents has rings radiating from it, like a child’s painting pinned to the refrigerator. 

There are three segments in each episode, all of them jauntily scored by composer Jeff Morrow, who clearly keeps a reverent ear tuned to the original Vince Guaraldi Peanuts music. Morrow appears happiest when bringing to life the adventures of Snoopy and his Scouts, who demonstrate in each episode a key lesson from their Handbook, such as How to Pitch a Tent and the importance of being Trustworthy. They also steal all sorts of extra screen time. My favorite: Snoopy is sleeping atop his tent and his noisy snores are generating giant Z’s that float up and over the tents of the bird troopers, one of whom gets so annoyed that he flies over with a butterfly net, captures Snoopy’s Z’s and buries them. 

Kids are sure to love the antic “Beagle v. Bug” and relate to “Sally’s Tooth,” which finds her worried that the Tooth Fairy won’t be able to locate her at camp. Lucy is not sympathetic; she knows to always leave a forwarding address. Among the summer’s key events are a cardboard boat regatta, the presentation of the Piney Awards (Pigpen wins Tidiest Bunk), and a bonafide crisis when Linus’s blanket goes missing: “I guess I have to learn to live as one-eighth of myself.” 

In the surprising “Leave It Like You Found It,” halfway through the season, the kids crash into an idyllic meadow the Beagle Scout troop has discovered and end up ruining it with loud music, trash, and general disregard for the natural world. Snoopy is disgusted. The gang quickly sets things right, but the story remains jarring, one of the rare times Charlie Brown and his friends have acted rashly, and, worse, affected the world in a negative way. 

The brilliant 2022 special It’s the Small Things, Charlie Brown finds Sally becoming the protector of a lone dandelion growing in the middle of Charlie Brown’s pitcher’s mound. Desperate to clear the field for a big game, Charlie Brown grabs at the flower and the dandelion is destroyed, devastating his little sister. Such moments, so unexpectedly fraught, confirm that the Apple TV Peanuts renaissance spearheaded by Charles Schulz’s son Craig is not only pleasing to the eye but thematically ambitious. And the filmmakers are quietly bringing joy into Charlie Brown’s life. It was there at the end of The Peanuts Movie, and it’s all through Camp Snoopy. He’s still a pessimist and still trips over his own feet (literally), but he also becomes something of a touchstone for his fellow campers. They continually turn to their friend Charlie Brown for insight when they feel down on themselves. Who better? 

Snoopy loves Charlie Brown too. He always has, of course, but in the emotionally evolved Peanuts animation of today, he’s more willing to show it. As summer ends, boy and dog get locked in a storage shed and end up playing astronaut, and they’re having a blast when rescued. Not long after, it’s time to head home. Charlie Brown climbs onto the bus. We don’t see him at the window but we know he’s not sitting alone, despairing at his summer failures. He’s sitting with his friends, sure as anything, and he’s smiling.  ❖