À la carte (March 9, 2025)

A quirky movie, a riveting book, an emotional documentary, and a haunting article

Some weeks are for writing and some weeks are for consuming! I spent the last week in LA visiting my in-laws and didn’t write a word! But after our jet-lagged daughter went to bed at 5:55 every night, Ben and I crashed on the couch of our Airbnb for a couple of hours of TV and books before we fell asleep at 8 pm. While it wasn’t exactly a vacation—Ben was working and I was taking care of our daughter—the week provided a reprieve from never-ending housework and errands, which is probably how we were able to read and watch so much. Here are some highlights:

A feature film

Janet Planet is a quiet and quirky little A24 film that is definitely not for everyone, which is probably why you’ve never heard of it. But if you don’t need a lot of plot or a lot of men in a movie, you should check out playwright Annie Baker’s depiction of an 11-year-old girl’s uneventful summer at home after she demands to be picked up by her mother from sleepaway camp. Lacy, played by Zoey Ziegler in her screen debut, is cresting the awkward hill between childhood and adolescence, still playing with toys but increasingly aware of the adult dynamics around her—of which there are many. Julianne Nicholson is captivating as a romantically-preoccupied bohemian single mom/acupuncturist who seems to have dated most eligible sexual partners in Massachusetts west of Amherst by the time we meet her.

Somehow this depiction of summer in Western Massachusetts in 1991 is a jewel of a period piece. (Clarissa Explains It All on tv in the background! Every single one of Janet's outfits!) Perhaps because the film is set not far from where I grew up and because the deafening cricket chorus was my own summer soundtrack for much of my life, nostalgia primed me to delight in this movie. Or perhaps I identified with Lacy because I too hovered on the awkward pre-adolescent hill longer than most, still playing school in my basement when I developed my first crush.

But ultimately this is a mother-daughter film, and what I am holding onto in this film was its absence of judgment for Janet as a mother. Janet is not portrayed as a perfect mother, but her imperfections don’t automatically result in her being portrayed as a bad mother (though there were a few moments when I asked myself whether I thought she could be more attentive to her daughter and a little less preoccupied with herself). A few moments of bad mothering do not a bad mother make! She’s a mother, but she is also more than her motherhood, and the moments in the film that struck me the most were the ones in which Janet unselfconsciously displays her full personhood, her non-mother self, around her daughter. I braced myself, expecting Janet’s bouts of self-absorption to unintentionally cause her daughter real harm, but instead, Janet seems like she is there for Lacy when she needs to be. And Lacy adores her mother! The sensuality of the tenderness between mother and daughter almost made me weep! May my daughter want to fall asleep holding my hand when she is eleven!

Janet Planet is streaming on MAX.