With Her Debut Feature ‘Janet Planet,’ Annie Baker Fractures a Girl’s Love for Her Hippie Mother— and Takes ‘Maniacal Pleasure’ in the Slow Burn

variety.com:

J. Kim Murphy It’s always been about timing for Annie Baker. In her author’s note for her second produced play “Circle Mirror Transformation,” she lays down the law on how to accurately perform the silences as she’s written them: A “short pause” is one second, a “pause” is two, a “long pause” is closer to four and a “silence” is at least five. “If you skip over or rush through these silences, you are performing a different play,” Baker writes in the note, published in 2010.

Now 14 years and seven plays later, the Pulitzer-winner has moved from the stage to cinema with her debut feature “Janet Planet,” which follows a single mother, Janet (Julianne Nicholson), and her doting 11-year-old daughter, Lacy (Zoe Ziegler), whose affections for her parent are reaching a quiet but definitive breaking point.

Expanding its limited release from A24 this weekend after a New York opening, the film provides a fresh, new landscape for Baker’s signature mastery of the loose rhythms of small talk and agonizing, emotionally evocative silences. “It was actually pure maniacal pleasure being able to control…” (A short pause.) “…the rhythm…” (A pause.) “…of a performance, six months after it happened,” Baker says in a Zoom interview. “Sometimes Julianne would text me and be like, ‘We haven’t talked in four months.’ And I’d be like, ‘I’m hanging out with you.’” “I’m so sick of your face!” Nicholson jokingly impersonates, seated next to Baker at the A24 offices in New York. “No!” Baker smiles. “It did fulfill a desire I’ve had for a long time to really sink my claws into the timing of a performance.” Nicholson and Ziegler venture into pregnant pauses aplenty in “Janet Planet.” The film begins with Lacy making a call in the dead of night,.