Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Annie Baker has enjoyed a long and storied career bringing small-scale human dramas to various mostly off-Broadway stages over the past few decades. She brings us her first feature film this week with Janet Planet, a gentle and quiet family drama that is either going to move the viewer in some kind of deep, profound way or will leave them checking their watch, ready for the story to be over.

Fade in on early 1990s rural Massachusetts. 11-year-old Lacy (Zoe Ziegler) spends the summer with her divorced mother Janet (Julianne Nicholson), an acupuncturist and kind of a hippie. We meet Janet’s current boyfriend (Will Patton), her friend who may or may not be involved in a religious cult (Sophie Okonedo), and her friend who is the leader of a community theater troupe (Elias Koteas). We basically follow the slow, mundane day to day life of this summer, where there are lots of small but allegedly significant moments between Lacy and her mother and the people she meets.

I can see Janet Planet being a movie that connects with a lot of people in a truly meaningful way. Maybe something in here will remind you of your childhood, the way your mother interacted with you, the way she was distant or the elements of her personality that you latched onto as a young person. Maybe the people in Janet’s life remind you of someone or something that was fundamental in your upbringing. And if that’s the case I totally respect that and totally understand why you would love this movie.

But as it stands, Janet Planet is not really for me. I enjoyed Julianne Nicholson’s performance. She’s always excellent, and is always doing thoughtful, layered work, always bringing more to the project than what is on the page. And I enjoyed the performance from child actress Zoe Ziegler. This is her first time acting in anything, and she’s a natural. She’s very charismatic but not in a showy way, in a way that feels like they picked this kid off the street and asked her if she wanted to be in a movie.

And yet, the pacing of this story about a child spending the summer with her mother in a rural town where not much happens, feels like that. The days are long, the pacing is languid, conversations are subdued almost to a fault, and not a whole lot ever really happens. And I’m a fan of ‘not much really happens’ cinema, but there’s a line. With a film like this, you either have to be on its wavelength or it won’t really work for you. 

I wondered if this story would be more appropriate for the stage, as with Annie Baker’s previous work, and maybe it could be. But there are no big acting moments here, no “Oscar reel” clips, and on the stage, actors would be performing this material in a completely different way. And there is great sensitivity to the storytelling here. I do appreciate the way it feels like you’re watching a memory unfold, and there is true specificity to Annie Baker’s storytelling. But ultimately, Janet Planet is not a movie that meant very much to me, and I was desperate for this summer to end.