Lawn Dogs

Camelot Gardens is a gated estate. Inside there are orderly houses, kept lawns and families watching one another. Devon is ten and they have just moved in; she has had heart surgery and her mother watches her constantly. She talks to nobody on the estate. Trent cuts the grass; he lives in a trailer by the river outside and comes in only to work. Devon follows him. The two become friends. It is a friendship nobody on the estate could accept, and someone notices. John Duigan directs. Sam Rockwell plays Trent and Mischa Barton plays Devon; Christopher McDonald and Kathleen Quinlan are in the cast. It is a British and American production. It is Mischa Barton's first film. The matter it treats is class; the distance between the people inside the estate and those living outside it is shown directly. The narrative uses elements of fairy tale; Devon tells a Russian story and that story finds its answer at the end. The film deliberately keeps the friendship between a child and an adult in an uncomfortable uncertainty and leaves the viewer on edge. The narrative shows the residents as hypocrites too; everyone is deceiving someone and nobody talks about it. The ending is hard and offers no hope. The film was little seen on release and became a cult later. Its limit is tone; the narrative is tense, the subject delicate, and the ending shattering. Who it is for: viewers who like nineties American independent cinema and narratives of class. Who it is not for: it is uncomfortable, bleak, and the ending bitter.