150 Word Review: 'Janet Planet' (2024)
Your mom
Life is hard, but comedies celebrate it anyway. Those celebrations can be vulgar, or sublime. Comedies usually end with a kiss, a wedding, or a dance party. But they can end with one person forgiving another for being a human being. There is something funny about a character who refuses to change and something moving about a character who grows despite the odds.
Award-winning playwright Annie Baker's first movie, Janet Planet, is a gentle stroll through a forest, where the movie is set, a lush, green wild far from any city. Lost in those woods are a single mother and daughter played delicately and with brutal honesty by Julianne Nicholson and Zoe Ziegler, two emotionally enmeshed misfits strangling and nurturing each other with love.
The movie's soundtrack—the buzzing of insects in the darkness—adds a sense of remoteness and tranquility to a comedy about the changing of the seasons.
Now I have to watch this. I never knew how single mothers pulled it off, especially my sister with 3 kids under 10 bringing them along while she cleaned condos in Florida and during other times she took in unwed homeless pregnant women in exchange for baby sitting her kids.
Now, my sister is a millionaire real estate broker with her own office and a 40 acre horse ranch.
No one helped her.
I still don’t know how she did it. Not even any child support.