Love, Safety, and the 1990s

Eleven-year-old Lacy isn’t sure if she should take the antibiotics. She sounds out the word—AN-TI-BI-OTICS. She knows her mother, an acupuncturist, thinks they’re bad. But her mother is letting her choose for herself whether or not to use modern medicine to cure her stomach virus—or perhaps just anxiety—that is keeping her from the first day of sixth grade. The paper pharmacy bag sits on the counter until Lacy climbs out from under the dining table to swallow exactly one pill. This scene in Janet Planet, the debut film from playwright Annie Baker, is one of many moments where a splinter between the maturity of a mother and a daughter doubles as a generational rupture, where a woman born in 1945 reaches out to a girl born in 1981 and tries to relate. A story at once so small and so, so large, Janet Planet is also a period piece about America’s awkward neoliberal turn in the 1990s and the vestiges of counterculture still hanging on.