“She understands, deep down, the culture of that area and that time period,” Baker says. “There were so many conversations that we didn’t need to have because of [that] Deep Understanding.”
Baker has portrayed New England life on stage before, but this is the first time the 43-year-old playwright — who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2014 for “The Flick,” about low-wage movie theater workers — has written and directed a film. The recently released coming-of-age drama “Janet Planet” is low-key; Baker elevates the simple joys and existential conundrums of everyday life. “Her characters wrestle with longings and a need to prove themselves, but they rarely share their struggles out loud,” says The Washington Post’s four-star review.
Fortunately, Nicholson, 52, is known for conveying big emotions with little fuss. Her characters’ reticence can be mistaken for stoicism, but those who pay close attention will detect a maelstrom of feelings churning beneath the surface. Her furrowed brow speaks volumes. That skill earned her an Emmy Award in 2021 for the HBO murder mystery “Mare of Easttown,” in which she plays a small-town woman who discovers agonizing truths about her family, and caught Baker’s attention in the 2019 film “Monos,” in which Nicholson plays an engineer held hostage in a Colombian jungle by teenage guerrillas.
Nicholson, according to Baker, is a “low-key actor.”
“She’s always thinking, and you can feel it on her face, but what exactly she’s thinking is hard to articulate,” Baker says. “That kind of active thinking, combined with psychological mystery, felt really, really important to the role. It’s a very rare thing that she has in abundance.”
“Janet Planet” unfolds from the perspective of 11-year-old Lacy (Zoe Ziegler), a quiet, contemplative child who lives with her single mother, an acupuncturist. Janet receives three visitors during the summer of 1991, whose stays reveal to Lacy that Janet may not be the woman she believed herself to be. Press materials describe this gradual disillusionment as “falling out of love with your mother,” a phrase that now makes Baker cringe. “I feel like it’s more complicated than that,” she says.
Once again, Nicholson understood. Lacy comes to see Janet not only as her diligent caretaker, but also as a complete human being with her own needs. The actress returned to moments from her childhood to better connect with the story, remembering the “long hugs” that some of her herbalist mother’s friends used to share. The prolonged hugs made Nicholson squirm instantly. It was difficult to understand why these adults, who should have everything under control, were clinging to each other.
“You can sense the need or desperation of one or both people,” she says.
Upon reflection, Nicholson believes that her mother’s friends, who led a rather bohemian lifestyle, were “searching for meaning.” In the film, it is Lacy who makes this discovery. She watches silently as Janet hugs her old friend Regina (Sophie Okonedo), estranged since a fight years ago. Lacy becomes protective of Janet when her boyfriend, Wayne (Will Patton), lashes out amid her mental health struggles. Later, Lacy watches curiously as Janet talks to Avi (Elias Koteas), the leader of a cult theater troupe that has its eye on her.
Sometimes Janet invites Lacy into her thought process. When Wayne’s episodes begin, Janet asks the pre-teen what she should do. Nicholson, recalling the brief period before her own mother remarried, says that single mothers and daughters share “a very private relationship.” There can be a level of codependency, she explains, “and I don’t mean that in a negative way. It’s just different.”
Baker, who grew up with a divorced mother, adds that “marriage gets a lot of gray area screen time without a lot of moralizing. I felt like I hadn’t seen that the way I wanted to in a relationship between a parent and a child.”
Over the course of the summer, Janet and Lacy evolve side by side. Lacy, who struggles to make friends her age, tries to make sense of human connection. Her Journey is “about how a child’s perception, worldview, philosophy, and spiritual life can change over the course of two months, which is a huge amount of time for an 11-year-old girl,” says Baker. Janet learns that she needs to seek approval from within, rather than from men like Wayne and Avi.
“It’s a big key to who she is and where she’s been getting a lot of her validation for most of her life,” says Nicholson. “That kind of attention was always something she could fall back on.”
Baker says he has written several screenplays throughout his career, but chose “Janet Planet” as his directorial debut because “it was the first time I wrote a script that I could actually see.” Although the story explores universal themes, their casings are region specific. Baker returned to western Massachusetts while writing, spending a month among other artists in the foothills of the Berkshires. She snuck into her old camp, Shire Village, in Cummington — where they filmed the opening scenes of “Janet Planet” — and soaked up the natural sounds of summer in Amherst. The film foregoes a traditional instrumental score so as not to “undermine the power of the insects and the trees,” she says. “I didn’t want to telegraph in any way what was happening inside me. [Lacy’s] brain through music.”
Working on the film brought back a flood of memories for Nicholson, who hadn’t been back to the area in about 30 years. “It’s crazy how much of it is unchanged,” she says. They filmed a scene in Hampshire Mall in Hadley, which still houses the personally significant J.C. Penney. On the way to another location, they passed through Goshen, where Nicholson was a camp counselor every summer. She brought her family members out, showing the two teenagers the street where she grew up. She visited old swimming holes with her mother, now 73.
Much of the filmmaking process came down to “deepening our connections to place because it’s such an important character in the film,” according to Nicholson. Entering Janet’s life — in such a personal setting — led the actress to reflect on what it means to investigate where you came from. Was she revisiting the past or creating a new present? Whose inner life was she exploring?
“I am myself? And my mother? Are these my mother’s friends? Women in general? Middle age?” she says. “It involves going a little deeper into your own heart. But for me, that’s the most interesting thing.”
