“they kept her in a castle, where she was safe” (notes on my favorite movie)
Written: Jun 29 '03 (Updated Sep 03 '03)
Product Rating:
Pros: Attention to detail, characterization, photography, story, acting.
Cons: None, unless you count the awful description on the box at the videostore.
The Bottom Line: A great love story, a great drama, a great and angry social commentary, and sometimes pretty funny too. Sam Rockwell and Mischa Barton oughtta be stars now.
Having now seen Lawn Dogs for the third time, I am quite sure that this 1997 film is my favorite movie ever. This imposes a serious challenge, given the unlikelihood of me writing the best review ever. Lawn Dogs itself has no trouble getting started, though, so I’ll borrow its beginnings as my own starting point.
We first see ten-year-old Devon in a field where she recites, as a young boy will recite his imaginary sports triumphs, the Russian fairytale of Baba Yaga, a witch who lived deep in the forest. The girl in the story trespasses, is chased by the evil witch, comes out safely from the forest, and returns to her castle home where she was safe. The moral of the story, Devon decides when later challenged, is “Fear what’s bad, I guess”.
It’s a logical story for her parents to have picked out: they’ve moved to the gated Camelot Gardens two months ago, giving the father a new chance to be a mover-and-shaker, running for the town board. Already it is time for Devon to sell the most cookies of any of the Young Rangers, and Dad has mapped out a house-by-house guide to where she should sell (“You can skip the Walshes, they’re in Rhode Island this week”).
It’s not Devon’s idea, clearly. Her manicured blond girliness is marred by a sullen frown, and she squashes a fly neatly into a girl-shaped piece of dough in just the place where the raisin belly-button would otherwise go. Her parents send her off with three pieces of advice, followed as she’s halfway down the walk with “Daddy loves you” (she doesn’t reply). When, while selling, she can’t easily reach one house’s doorbell, she ponders the effort to stand on tiptoe, then walks off. Then again, when Nash, the Camelot Gardens head of security, greets her with a warm “Devon Stockard! Now there’s a girl who’s going places! Would you like me to buy one of your cookies?”, and Devon coldly replies “You’re not on my list!”, it’s not clear if she’s mocking her instructions or just following them, as listlessly obedient as she knows how. She is the movie’s heroine: but not yet. Not here, not doing this.
Meanwhile, we first see Trent, probably in his early 20’s, with a gun pointed to his head. “Stick’em up!”, gloats the round-faced bespectacled blond boy we see doing the pointing as the camera pulls back: he’s a close match for Smut, the much-too-inventive preteen boy in Drowning by Numbers. Trent is tolerant, but quickly polishes off the last bit of lawn he’s mowing and collects his money through a front door opened arm’s-width. “Hey! Could I come inside and use your bathroom?”, he asks as the door closes… “Guess not”, he mutters, and we seem him back in his truck, maneuvering a large convenience-store soda cup in position next to his crotch.
Security-cop Nash greets Trent warmly too, a little bit later, cooperatively testing the ignition while Trent futzes under his truck’s hood. Despite his grimace of disgust upon almost drinking from the soda cup, and Trent’s blunt declaration that “I stink to high heaven; I need a bath”, Nash reminisces for Trent about his own days mowing lawns as a youth. There’s steel under that warm chatter, though: “Be out of here by five”, Nash cautions before wandering off. “People are more afraid these days; you know how it is.”
Trent does, but he’ll be even scarier without that bath, so on the 1-lane bridge out of Camelot he stops his car, strips naked, and dives into the river to get clean. Played by Sam Rockwell – who single-handedly salvaged Box of Moonlight, and also stripped naked, as a character actor the previous year – he is a lean and muscular freakshow for the drivers in back of him; at least one of the young suburban women in back of his car finds him shagworthy. Nothing more, of course: we later see him begging Patti for his belt back as she leaves his trailer freshly dressed. “How am I supposed to hold my pants up?”, he asks. “You’ll find a way”, she shrugs, “and it’s Pam. Pam Gregory”. “Shiit”, he mutters, self-disgusted.
Trent is the film’s hero, and perhaps he’s never a terribly heroic one, but he’s certainly not the hero yet. Not by being this: useful, exploitable, and Other.
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The reason we see Pam stealing his belt is that we’re seeing through the eyes of Devon (played by the elvishly cute Mischa Barton, later the star of the also-excellent Skipped Parts) – but that’s her second time visiting. Her first visit started at the town gates, tugging her wheelbarrow as she ponders what tale to start telling. “At the edge of a big dark forest lived a girl with her mother and father. One day they made her a big batch of cookies, to go and sell in the forest. Now the girl was not stupid, and knew they were trying to get rid of her, but her father said ‘Don’t argue’. So she went… the girl walked on and on”, and as movies telescope time, we see her approaching Trent’s trailer. “Until she came to a clearing!”, Devon says with wonder, pushing through Trent’s rusty gate and sneaking to the door itself. “Baba Yaga’s castle!”, she breathes. She’s still exploring it as he comes home, finding her scared and sprawled on his floor, her cookies scattered. “I’m Devon Stockard, and I’m selling cookies for the Young Rangers”, she says, awkwardly starting her pitch; and thus they meet.
They make, from the beginning, an intriguing duo. Devon speaks precisely and is dressed like a young lady, but moves – when away from parents -- with casual disregard for decorum; the first things she establishes in common with Trent are (1) that she thinks his '65 Ford has the best engine Ford ever made, and (2) she can burp almost as well as he can. Trent is dirty, though only because he works all day in the hot sun and doesn’t come home to plumbing; he drawls, which is nice for Devon because she doesn’t like kids: “They smell like TV, and talk too fast”. Trent doesn’t usually have anything better to do than deal with Devon, perhaps, but she’s full of dangerous ideas: she wants him to climb really high in the trees, or to buy cookies, or just to keep her company. Trent feels safer with silence: he knows how to keep his place.
He doesn’t necessarily _want_ to keep his place, mind you. The next time we see him with Pam, he’s asking when she’ll give him her phone number. “You don’t have a phone”, Pam observes; “I got a quarter”, he says, flipping one as proof. “Well isn’t this your lucky day!”, she says brightly, ducking the question; “Same time next week?”, he concedes to the inevitable. “I dunno, my schedule is really wacky lately, but I’ll definitely fit you in when I can”, she promises. “Look, when can I meet your parents?”, he tries: “Your brother, your sister, any dogs or cats or cockatiels you got lyin’ around?”. Greatly amused, Pam leaves.
But that’s the easy bit. We see Trent’s balancing act in starker relief, still early in the movie: the way a party on the lawn while he works can turn into threats from all sides. “I finished mowing your lawn”, he tells Devon’s Dad (a.k.a. Morton); “Yes, we heard you”, Morton replies, with a strong implication that the noise was darned annoying. “Would you like something to eat?”, Morton offers, as he grills steaks; he’s persistent enough to persuade Trent to say yes, and immediately calls “Honey, could you put a couple of hot dogs on?”. By the time the hot dogs are delivered, Trent has already been mocked by a couple of handsome private-school 18-year-old boys who hang around, one of whom seems pretty defensive about Pam; and he’s asked, almost interrogated, about the recent spate of missing lampshades. While eating, Trent asks for his payment: “This is ten dollars less than we agreed on”, he points out after counting. “What are you trying to say?”, Morton blusters, “I gave you a couple of hot dogs”.
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One reason this is a great movie is simply that keen sense of class. I’ve seen it suggested that the Lawn Dogs suburbanites are cartoons, which is false for other reasons as well, but on class issues, in specific, this movie is pitch-perfect. Maybe you’ve never had best friends whose parents were on and off welfare, but I have. Maybe you’ve never pursued girls as librarian’s son seeking banker’s daughter or lawyer’s daughter, but I have (and the girls themselves were not the problem). Maybe you’ve never invited homeless people to stay with you, but I have, and we’ve talked. Maybe you’ve never been a maid, or a waitress at a high-class restaurant, and neither have I, but friends of mine have passed on sufficiently frightening stories. Maybe you’ve never been caught by the cops for Driving While Black, and obviously neither have I, but the statistics back up the stories. Trent is useful, but he’s an outsider, and he’s unclean (literally), and who really knows what those people are capable of? Poor men in California have literally been given life sentences, since the three-strikes law, for stealing loaves of bread. Wealthy men in California have literally been convicted of deliberately making heart-monitoring devices (a la pacemakers) that killed hundreds of people, and been fined. The rules are different, so the Lawn Dogs characters are right: watch your lampshades, beware of gifts, and be careful who you use the nice glasses for.
That said, most of the suburbanites have traits slightly more complex than that. Blonde teenager Brett moves and drawls like the evil twin of Owen Wilson, the black hole left when Owen got all the peyote-fed hippie goodwill, but even Brett has a slacker sense of humor when he’s happy. His best friend Sean even has a conscience, trying to establish better terms with Trent because they were in the third grade together, for awhile, before Sean was pulled into private school, remember, huh? “Oh yeah, you were the one with the blue BMW”, Trent recalls; “Was I?”, Sean admits with helpless honesty, “I don’t remember”. It’s Trent , bristling from accusations of theft, who pokes the hole in Sean’s shirt and says “You shouldn’t dress like shiit coming to a party; in 3rd grade you knew better”. It’s Sean who looks thoughtfully at Trent’s poking hands and says “You could’ve been a surgeon”.
Of course, it’s still Sean who’s best friends with Brett, and best friends are loyal. It’s still Nash, old working-class boy and former lawn dog who doesn’t even live in Camelot Gardens, who worries about doing his job the way the residents want. It’s still Morton who, though he does love his daughter, has his grownup plans of how she must be. Good instincts don’t always feel safe enough to poke their little heads out: that rings true too.
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It rings true most importantly, though, in the central story: Devon and Trent (“Trent and Devon! Devon and Trent! Trent and Devon!”, as she savors the words in Trent’s car one day). Lawn Dogs is my favorite cinematic love story, and if my favorite cinematic love story is both nonsexual – which it is – and illicit, I guess that’s how it goes. It’s the girl who is, by far, the initiator; but how long should a man resist a cute girl who climbs trees and howls at the moon and wants to see his ugly scar from when he got shot? Of course he loosens up and lets his own playful humor loose, as he starts to dare. It’s the girl whose parents would be horrified that a full-grown man, not even from around here, is spending time with their daughter; the entire purpose of gated communities is to keep away men like Trent, and you know that’s true. But how long can you act secretive and frightened when you’re happy?
This is a great movie for more than the story, to be sure. The cinematography makes elegant use of everything from lettuce leaves to lampshades to red ribbons to the simple crushing power of a power-mower’s turbine blades. The acting is excellent, with even Devon’s parents carrying themselves like stressed and dissatisfied people, rather than like the supposedly-comic rich people who wander into Gilmore Girls episodes. The bad events that happen (of course there are bad events) could easily have been triggered by Devon’s adventures – thus implying a fairly dark moral that maybe one shouldn’t cross class boundaries after all. But no, mostly they were going to happen anyway. The difference being that, without a love story, the victim would also have been unloved.
Mainly, though, there’s the story itself. I hope you’ll discover its twists and its inevitabilities for yourself. I’ve cried at a movie four or five times in my adult life, and three of them were the three times I watched this one, yet one could argue that it has a happy ending. It carries the weight of a fairytale, yet it makes itself a story of human beings. It’s something special. And it deserves a lot more competition for the role of its #1 fan.
In the affluent, gated community of camelot gardens, bored wivesindiscriminately sleep around while their unwitting husbands trydesperately to clim th...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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