indulge in some quiet time |
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copyright
©1999-2000 |
Plot synopsis Ten-year-old Devon Stockard lives in the posh gated suburban community of Camelot Gardens. Dad’s too busy trying to climb the local political ladder to notice that bored housewife Mom is having an affair with a dumb-ass neighborhood college boy. Neither knows quite what to make of their strange little girl, who seems unable to make friends with other girls her age. (Actually, she’s just uninterested: "I don’t like children. They smell like TV.") Of course, her vacuous parents are so self-involved that when one day, Devon’s rebellious streak sends her walking straight out of the sheltered confines of Camelot, red wagon full of homemade Girl-scout-type cookies in tow, they haven’t a clue that she’s wandered out into the big wide world. That afternoon, she stumbles across a trailer in the middle of the woods, the home of Trent, a twenty-something young man who makes his living by mowing lawns for rich folks like Devon’s. Oddball Devon feels an immediate kinship with the misfit loner, and pesters her way into a friendship with him. It’s a relationship that both realize must remain a secret from the paranoid and class-conscious adults of Devon’s world.
Review Up
until the last 20 minutes or so of Lawn Dogs, I’d have
enthusiastically given the big ‘ol thumbs up to this unusual little
flick, raving about its depiction of the unsettlingly strange
relationship that develops between a precocious, affluent little girl
and the lawn-mowing, trailer-dwelling young man she befriends. I’m all
for the unexpected when it comes to movie endings, but this one –
without injecting too much of a spoiler, let’s just say that the
magical realism-imbued finale demands sudden and complete suspension of
disbelief on the part of the viewer – left me yelling "where the
*!?! did that come from?" at the screen. Nevertheless, there’s
enough that’s intriguing and lyrical and yes, even a little daring in
this lazily rambling flick that it’s definitely worth a look -- from
the beautifully saturated, fairy-tale colors to such wonderfully
unexpected plot caprices as when, shortly after the Trent character is
first introduced, we watch him park his truck smack in the middle of a
one-lane bridge, strip buck-naked as if oblivious to the gawking
on-lookers, and do a graceful dive straight into the river. Mischa Barton
does an amazing, Natalie Portman-esque (a la The Professional,
not her more recent dreck) turn as the simultaneously worldly-wise and
angelically innocent young Devon, and Sam Rockwell is just plain sublime
as Trent.
---------------------------> lounge . nourish . host . laze . home .
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