Mischa Barton makes a sparkling screen debut in this fresh and lively urban fairy tale. Barton plays Devon, a new transplant, along with her uptight parents, to the even more uptight suburbian utopia of Camelot Gardens, a closed-in, upper-class neighborhood that might be anywhere in America. The highly imaginative ten-year-old has no friends, and instead lives through her fantasies. Yet, when she travels outside the walls of the Gardens and ends up at the trailer of Trent Burns (Sam Rockwell), a poor eccentric who mows her family's lawn, a friendship blossoms. When tragedy strikes the dog of a local bully, their secret relationship is made public and the community explodes. Rockwell gives a thoroughly funny, engaging performance as the outcast Trent, and makes his bond with the younger Devon seem honest, heartfelt, and beautiful. LAWN DOGS is a thoughtful and heartwarming tale of a friendship that defies the rules of class or age.
2.
In the affluent, gated commnunity of Camelot Gardens, bored wives indiscriminately sleep around while their unwitting husbands try desperately to climb the social ladder. Twenty-one-year-old Trent, an outsider who mows the neighborhood lawns, quietly observes the infidelities and hypocrises of this overly privileged society. When Devon, a 10-year-old daughter from one family, forges a friendship with Trent, things suddenly become very complicated.
3.
No review of Lawn Dogs can adequately describe this extraordinary movie, nor can the title or any simple synopsis. In fact, there's no way of knowing what Lawn Dogs is really about until the very end when the last 90-minutes takes on a whole new significance.
The basic story follows the formation and fruition of a simple friendship. Devon (astounding newcomer Mischa Barton) is a 10-year-old girl born to glamour magazine identikit parents who live in the plush US suburban Camelot Gardens Estate. Trent (Sam Rockwell) is a 20-something lawnmower man whom everyone considers trash and who lives in a forest trailer. As secret friends they fill the holes in one another's lives. She has no other friends because she thinks "other kids smell like TV". It's all perfectly sweet and innocent. But naturally there's no way the uptight neighbourhood would perceive it that way. A creeping sense of doom begins to overtake events; but it is where this seemingly obvious tale twists at the end that makes the community's darker quirks a revelation.
On the DVD:Lawn Dogs on disc comes in a 16:9 transfer that retains the superb cinematography of endlessly stretching flat horizons. The three-channel sound is equally of benefit to a subtle bluesy score. Regrettably the only extra is a trailer. As a winner at numerous International Film Festivals, this picture really deserved something more. --Paul Tonks
Mooviees.com is not the official site for this film.
All editorial views and opinions expressed here are for entertainment purposes only.
Movie Database
In Theaters
