Annie Baker is a writer of silences.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, recently turned screenwriter and director, has become associated with choreographed moments of quiet. She instructs on how to map her ‘pauses’ and ‘silences’ down to the second. She delineates the difference between “a happy pause in which [characters] realize they’ve broken the tension, and then an awkward pause following that happy pause,” using silence the way other writers do dialogue. For a playwright, this is the ultimate tool within the medium. As she’s described, “time is passing at the same rate for the actors on stage as it is for the audience.” When it’s brought to film? It’s a risk, but one worth taking.
Annie Baker’s Debut Film Janet Planet
Annie’s debut feature, Janet Planet, was released in June throughout the United States after spending much of last year in film festivals around the world. The film tells the muggy, understated story of a mother and daughter. It takes place over the course of a summer in Western Massachusetts in 1991. Eleven year old Lacey (Zoe Ziegler) gradually falls out of love with her mother Janet (Julianne Nicholson). Janet, a single parent who works as an acupuncturist and wears long flowing skirts, has a kind of magnetism about her. Each of the story’s three acts follow a different person drawn into the duo’s lives. First, there’s boyfriend Wayne and his estranged daughter. Then, an old friend, Regina, seeking refuge from a cult. Finally, there is Avi, the cult leader himself.
“I’ve always had this knowledge that I could make any man fall in love with me if I really tried,” she whispers to Lacey in bed one night. “And I think maybe it’s ruined my life.”
Janet’s Life/Lacey’s Perspective
To frame it like this, however, disregards the true tone of the movie. The film does not investigate Janet’s love life because the audience sees the world through Lacey’s point of view. She is in every scene, even the ones you don’t expect. While Regina and Janet trip on shrooms, posing existential questions about their lives, Lacey appears to be absent. That is, until she rises from below the bottom frame to fetch a glass of water. Even when Janet doesn’t seem to be aware of her presence, the tone of childhood colors the entirety of the film, making it nostalgic rather than romantic. It took Annie months to find the right actress to play Lacey.
“I wanted somebody a little more prickly,” she said in an interview with NPR. “And I wanted somebody with a really rich interior life that we didn’t totally understand or have access to. And I wanted somebody who… you just didn’t totally know what she was thinking and someone who didn’t seem like a kid who wanted to be an actor or who would ever be an actor.”
And Western Massachusetts Plays an Important Role
The movie is set in Western Massachusetts, the same location of Annie’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, The Flick. Despite being Baker’s hometown, it is not autobiographical. In fact, in the same NPR interview, she seemed to bristle at the question. Julianne also grew up in Western Mass (she and Annie frequented the same stores and ponds, though they didn’t realize it until casting). The place is key in setting the tone for the film. There is no score, only the intense recordings of the rural forest, familiar summer sounds of crickets, birds, and crunching gravel. Sound becomes vitally important in Annie’s characteristic silences, and she referred to her sound designer (Paul Hsu) as a “composer.” One can hear the New England heat as much as one can feel it.
“There’s something so liberating and open about summer and hot weather,” Annie has said. “And then there’s also something a little oppressive and scary and distended, I think, about the way time moves in the summer.”
Annie Baker’s Filmmaking Style & Playing with Silence
These silences, long and pronounced, create a slow and languid atmosphere that plays beautifully with both the heat and Annie’s unique style. The first scene, for example, opens with Lacey leaving her cabin at camp to call her mom to pick her up. The still camera stays framed on a wide environmental shot as she walks down a long path towards the lit building with a phone, in no rush to get to the next story beat. The dinner conversations are punctuated by long, lingering pauses. They breed as much discomfort or camaraderie in silence as any speech could.
In theater, these silences began to test some audience’s patience. Reportedly, so many people complained or walked at The Flick’s intermission, frustrated at lengthy pauses and the massive three hour run time, that Playwright’s Horizons’ artistic director Tim Sanford issued an unprecedented letter of defense to its subscribers. Many critics questioned the necessity of spending so many minutes on sweeping, shuffling, and banging the dustpan.
“I wouldn’t call that silence,” Annie responded. “I think there’s actually very little ACTUAL silence in this play…my favorite moments in all of my plays are usually moments when people aren’t talking.”
The Environmental Soundtrack of Janet Planet
This is the exact ethos exhibited in Janet Planet, an embrace of environmental soundtrack over the human one. In film, this has the potential to be even more tedious, with the pause button always in arm’s reach. No one I’ve known, however, has walked out. In cinema, the actors in front of you convincingly convey realism without requiring the suspension of disbelief. These pauses serve to provide an almost voyeuristic glimpse into the lives of these characters. Mother and daughter are quiet for a minute while checking for ticks. Lacey walks to her piano lessons. The two lie in bed, looking at the ceiling fan. It is in the silent moments that these characters become three dimensional, full of quiet interiority.
“Whatever the epiphany is in Janet Planet,” Annie said, looking back on the film, “it’s very private.”
© Catherine Sawoski (7/15/24) – Special for FF2 Media
LEARN MORE/DO MORE
Read more about The Flick and Annie’s playwriting career from FF2 Media’s Julia Lasker.
Watch the trailer for Janet Planet.
Read a Variety interview with Annie Baker and Julianne Nicholson.
Listen to Annie Baker’s NPR interview.
CREDITS & PERMISSIONS
Featured photo: Film still from JANET PLANET (2023), directed by Annie Baker and starring Julianne Nicholson, Zoe Ziegler, Luke Philip Bosco and June Walker Grossman. Image Credit: BFA / A24 / Alamy Stock Photo. Image ID: 2WYG205
Middle photo: Film poster for JANET PLANET (2023), directed by Annie Baker and starring Julianne Nicholson, Zoe Ziegler, Luke Philip Bosco and June Walker Grossman. Image Credit: BFA / A24 / Alamy Stock Photo. Image ID: 2WYG0XJ
Bottom photo: Julianne Nicholson, Zoe Ziegler, and Annie Baker arrive on the red carpet for the showing of the film JANET PLANET (2023) at the 61st New York Film Festival at Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center in New York, New York, on Oct. 8, 2023. Image Credit: Gabriele Holtermann / Sipa USA / Alamy Live News. Image ID: 2T0RJRA
