Janet Planet

I was intrigued by the trailer for Janet Planet so I decided to see it at the Broadway yesterday.  I was really impressed with the performances but I sometimes found it very tedious to sit through.  Janet (Julianne Nicholson) is a free-spirited acupuncturist living in rural Massachusetts with her precocious 11-year-old daughter Lacy (Zoe Ziegler).  During the summer of 1991 Janet has an ill-fated relationship with a withdrawn and troubled boyfriend (Will Patton), reconnects with an old friend (Sophie Okonedo) who is fleeing a new age commune, and pursues a friendship with the guru (Elias Koteas) of this commune.  Lacy cannot bear to be away from her mother (she begs to come home from summer camp and even pretends to be sick to delay going back to school) but she spends most of her time on the periphery of Janet's life while silently judging her choices.  This is a very impressionistic examination of a codependent relationship between a mother and daughter in which newcomer Ziegler brilliantly portrays the loneliness of a child who inhabits an adult world while Nicholson is heartbreaking as a mother who loves her child but is being suffocated by her neediness.  The narrative is incredibly thin and, while that is not necessarily a bad thing, the characters need to be compelling to sustain interest.  Unfortunately, I found them both to be unlikable (Janet is aimless and Lacy is manipulative) and there isn't any growth or resolution (I was actually stunned when the credits started rolling).  The images are beautiful and I liked the use of natural sound instead of an original score but the pacing is so boring deliberate that my mind wandered frequently (I get that many of these scenes are meant to mimic the boredom of a child spending the summer with only adults for company but that makes it boring for the audience, as well).  I am definitely in the minority but this just didn't do anything for me.