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Annie Baker Goes to Hollywood
The renowned playwright switches mediums with her sneakily expansive debut film, Janet Planet, about a possessive mother-daughter relationship.
It unfolds across three chapters separated by relationships that Janet ( Julianne Nicholson), an overaccommodating single mother, has with the other adults in her life: her boyfriend ( Will Patton), a friend and outdoor-theater performer ( Sophie Okonedo), and a Rilke-quoting director (Elias Koteas). In person, Baker is chatty and inquisitive; she notices, mid-conversation, the movements of people and nature around us, registering both when a woman at a nearby table shifts inside to get away from the sound of our interview and the red flash of a cardinal flying into a tree overhead. Her plays have always touched the mysterious through the means of the mundane, and her more recent work has tilted further toward the uncanny: In 2015’s John, a millennial couple visit a Gettysburg inn teeming with an unnatural number of dolls; in The Antipodes, there’s the cursed endless gloom state of the writers’ room; in Infinite Life, the ethereal un-time of wellness.
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