Janet Planet | The Bikeriders
Two distinct searches for a sense of identity.
The first thing we notice in Annie Baker’s feature film debut, Janet Planet, is the lively stillness of midsummer nights in rural Massachusetts: crickets and tree frogs in chorus with each other, somewhere close by in the warm dark. The second thing we notice is that the movie’s patience matches its setting. It opens with a shot of a preteen girl sitting on the edge of her camp bunk bed, working up her courage to make a phone call, her face hidden by shadows and her hand gripping the edge of her bed. When she leaves her cabin to cross her summer camp to make that phone call, we watch her march, determined, away from the camera and down the hill to the central office. The camera stays detached. The shot is fixed; she walks across the composition without any regard for focal distance. She traces her own path across the camp in one long, patient take. When she picks up the office phone, she states matter-of-factly to the person on the other end of the line: “I’m gonna kill myself if you don’t come get me.”
Lacy (Zoe Ziegler) is the girl. She’s observant, peering out at the world through rounded glasses with a grave expression on her face. Most of the time she’s quiet, her mouth pursed in an almost-frown, but when she does speak, she’s prone to making statements—such as the above—that come across as too-serious and unsettling. She hasn’t quite figured out how to modulate her tone to her audience just yet. She lives in the wooded hills of rural Massachusetts with her mother, Janet (Julianne Nicholson), a woman who picks up relationships with other people easily and who seems lovingly baffled by the person her daughter is starting to become.
Lacy and Janet are casually entangled in each other’s lives. The two sleep in the same bed whenever Janet is unpartnered. They don’t seem to get in each other’s way all that much. They coexist: Lacy practicing piano on her tiny Casio keyboard, Janet practicing acupuncture from a room at the front of her house. The film shifts perspectives between Lacy and Janet with easy, gentle turns, back and forth like the oscillating fans that are scattered about their house in the summer heat. Lacy reads, plays with a collection of porcelain dolls, practices piano, and listens in on Janet’s conversations with the adults in her life. When she asserts herself, it’s in small statement and little rebellions, like her threat from the opening scene or like telling her piano teacher that she hadn’t bothered to practice much that week. Another story might frame the summer as a direct clash between mother and daughter as they grow apart, but Janet Planet is interested in more subtle conflict than directly opposed confrontation.
The film explores Janet’s character in triptych, divided across three different relationships throughout the summer. Sometimes her daughter disappears from view for stretches of time; the movie is just as much Janet’s as it is Lacy’s. Lacy is still present in these scenes, just as Janet is always a presence when Lacy is the focus of the film. In one sequence, after an extended conversation between Janet and another adult, Lacy stands up, and the camera includes only her forehead and her glasses at the bottom of the frame. The conversation has been literally over Lacy’s head, but she’s still listening and absorbing these pieces of her mother’s life, often to bittersweetly humorous effect.
Baker’s script and direction both find humor in the mundane. At piano lessons, Lacy’s teacher draws a face on the side of her thumb and tells her to “make the man kiss the keys” when she plays; the face has angry little eyebrows and a tight-lipped expression, much like Lacy herself. The humor is founded on Lacy’s character. Baker’s observations are both kind and patient, drawn from long, static, watchful takes: the kind of formal difficulty in filmmaking that appears deceptively simple because it presents its complicated subject matter simply, with no artifice. Lacy and Janet tell each other they’re both unhappy; their actions demonstrate the malaise each feels in her own life without stooping to melodrama or histrionics. Neither character is miserable, just dissatisfied with her lot in life, and they each discover over the course of this summer that they cannot be the other’s only support. Baker’s film demonstrates a gentle affection for these two drifting souls, neither lost nor completely at home in their respective skins. Maybe someday they’ll find a balance. Simply getting to observe this small portion of their journey is a delight.—Sarah Welch-Larson
★★★★
Janet Planet is in theaters nationwide now.
The Bikeriders
“Whaddaya got?” Thus spake Marlon Brando’s biker in The Wild One: a life-changing line of dialogue for The Bikeriders’ Johnny (Tom Hardy) as he watches the film on his living-room TV. In that scene from the 1953 film, Brando’s character (also named Johnny) is responding to the question “What are you rebelling against?”, giving voice to the same restlessness that afflicts most of the characters in The Bikeriders. Johnny wants something out of life; he can’t articulate to himself what that something is; Brando’s charismatic rebel provides him with a particularly attractive template to follow. So Johnny starts a biker gang.
Writer/director Jeff Nichols’s screenplay, drawing from a 1968 book of interviews by photojournalist Danny Lyon, uses the word “club” rather than “gang” most of the time. This choice initially frames Johnny’s organization (the “Chicago Vandals”—a sly nod to the Rome-despoiling barbarian tribe) as an almost boyish pursuit. The Vandal meetups in their bar-cum-clubhouse or in open, muddy fields have the raucous energy of the schoolyard; Johnny institutes rules designed as much to round out the biker fantasy as to serve any practical purpose. The club attracts Johnny’s kindred spirits, such as the taciturn Benny (Austin Butler), so committed to the lifestyle that he takes a beating with a shovel rather than take off his Vandals jacket. Most of these early goings-on are recounted to a photojournalist (Mike Faist) by Benny’s wife, Kathy (Jodie Comer), with equal parts affection and bemusement.
Of course, Johnny and his Vandals are not boys but men. Their biker exploits are a form of play at first, but men can play at such things for only so long before the game turns deadly serious. If the Vandals wish to project an air of danger, they must eventually become dangerous to back up their self-mythologizing. Johnny’s role as biker-gang kingpin begins to draw him into choices that rest uneasily in his mind; Benny’s devotion to complete freedom from obligations begins to exact its own toll. Their treasured open road increasingly seems like a narrow strip of blacktop, hemmed in on either side by featureless rows of Illinois corn.
Nichols has always had a talent for telling stories of everyday people whose lives become inflected with notes of enchantment or fate—think of Mud’s motorboat, suspended in midair by tree limbs, or the apocalyptic visions experienced by Take Shelter’s protagonist. Nichols’s eye for modest American myth asserts itself in The Bikeriders as well. One image of the Vandals on the highway frames them in an eye-level medium shot against a farmland backdrop. The wheels of their motorcycles are invisible below the bottom of the frame while the blurred, amber corn in the background reaches nearly up to the top of the frame. The characters glide past the camera, their silhouetted profiles and horizontal movement evoking the friezes of ancient Greece or Egypt. Like those monuments, the shot captures their peculiar legend and preserves it.
The sensitivity of these moments makes it frustrating that the humans at the center of the myth feel so remote. Hardy and Butler’s challenge is to play characters who, to some extent, are enigmas even to themselves, but they remain largely unknowable to the audience as well. Comer fares better, but as the de facto narrator for the men’s stories, she receives little time for inhabiting Kathy’s own experiences. In the supporting cast, reliable Nichols player Michael Shannon makes a strong impression as a bedraggled Vandal whose grimness masks his deep hurt over the rejection he’s received from his family and society. Shannon’s work suggests a man protecting himself under multiple layers of dissimulation: a uniform worn over a costume. The viewer wishes for more of him, especially as the film begins to drag in its final act.
It’s strange that a film so focused on a fundamental American fantasy—the ability to leave behind your old self at will and construct a new identity for yourself—stumbles in its portrayal of its central characters’ inner lives. The film leaves unexplored Johnny’s and Benny’s motivations for jumping into the biker lifestyle with both feet, which feels like a shortcoming more than an artful omission. Johnny and Benny are not hollow men who are merely adopting a facade for its convenience. Their time as Vandals ends up costing them both dearly. But for that drama to have weight, we need a stronger sense of what exactly they left behind.
This may be part of the point for Nichols: that we can’t truly get to the bottom of other people but can know only the identities that years of happenstance and effort have constructed around them. If so, that’s an intriguing approach, but not an entirely satisfying one. Johnny and Benny’s reluctance to disclose their true selves in response to the inquiries of other characters and even of the audience is perhaps the clearest sign that they are the disciples of Brando in The Wild One: in its own way, a successful act of characterization. That approach can carry the movie only so far, though. An excess of such coyness eventually begins to seem like a mere pose.—Kevin McLenithan
★★★☆
The Bikeriders is in theaters now.