Taglines: Innocence is a dangerous friend.
Lawn Dogs focuses on 10-year-old Devon Stockard (Mischa Barton), a precocious and lonely young girl who has recently moved into a gated community called Camelot Gardens in the suburbs of Louisville, KY with her parents, Morton and Clare (Christopher McDonald and Kathleen Quinlan).
Recently having recovered from open heart surgery, Devon is encouraged by her parents to make friends, and she is pushed to sell cookies for a charity event for the summer. While selling cookies, Devon leaves the gated community against the instruction of her mother, and meets Trent Burns (Sam Rockwell), a poor man who lives in a trailer in the woods, and who does landscaping work in Camelot Gardens. An imaginative child, Devon imagines her life to be like the fable of Baba Yaga, a fairytale which the film makes parallels to.
Devon, at first an annoyance to Trent, continues to come to his property and slowly befriends him; despite the innocence of their friendship, he insists that she keep it a secret due to their age difference. While working in Camelot Gardens, Trent begins having altercations with two young men who live there; Brett (David Barry Gray), who is having an affair with Devon’s mother; and Sean (Eric Mabius), a man with closeted homosexual tendencies who flirts with Trent.
During a family barbecue, Devon explores her father’s car in their garage. She finds her father’s handgun in the glove compartment of his SUV. Brett discovers her and with the gun and attempts to molest Devon in the garage, but she escapes. She tells her parents about the incident, but then insists that Brett was only trying to tickle her. Clare begins to notice Devon’s apparent friendship with Trent when he comes to do lawn work at their house, and becomes alarmed. Meanwhile, Brett and Sean terrorize Trent by pouring sugar in the fuel tank of his lawnmower and start a fight with him after they wrongfully believe he stole CDs from Sean’s car.
Devon and Trent’s friendship continues to grow, and the two go to visit Trent’s mother (Beth Grant) and his father (Tom Aldredge), a Korean War veteran who is dying of a lung disease. After leaving Trent’s parents’ house, Trent and Devon go for a drive in the country. While stopped in a field, Devon insists that since the two are “best friends”, she can show him her surgical scar on her chest.
She asks him to touch it to his reluctance, and then demands that he show her his abdominal scar which he sustained in a shooting. After showing each other their scars, the two see Sean’s dog running through the field, having escaped. While trying to chase the dog down in the truck, they accidentally run him over. Trent kills the badly injured dog in spite of Devon’s pleas for him not to, and she runs home in a panic over the incident.
Clare and Morton, concerned over Devon’s frantic behavior, ask her what happened, but she refuses to provide details, only saying that Trent killed Sean’s dog and mentions that she and Trent took turns showing each other their scars. Assuming that Trent molested her, Morton drives out to Trent’s property with Devon, assisted by Sean and an ex-cop who is a security guard in Camelot Gardens. The three men confront Trent while Devon sits in the car.
Lawn Dogs is a 1997 British-American fantasy-drama film directed by John Duigan and starring Mischa Barton and Sam Rockwell. The film tells the story of a precocious young girl (Barton) from a gated community who befriends a landscape worker (Rockwell), and examines the societal repercussions of their friendship. Written by Naomi Wallace, the film was released by Rank Organisation, and was the company’s last production.
The film uses the folktale of Baba Yaga as a prominent plot device. Although filmed in Louisville and Danville, Kentucky in the United States, Lawn Dogs was a British film produced by Duncan Kenworthy. Lawn Dogs won numerous film awards at film festivals in Europe and met with critical acclaim, in particular for Barton’s performance.
Lawn Dogs (1998)
Directed by: John Duigan
Starring: Sam Rockwell, Christopher McDonald, Kathleen Quinlan, Mischa Barton, Miles Meehan, Bruce McGill, Angie Harmon, Tom Aldredge, Angie Harmon
Screenplay by: Naomi Wallace
Production Design by: John Myhre
Cinematography by: Elliot Davis
Film Editing by: Humphrey Dixon
Costume Design by: John Dunn
Set Decoration by: James Edward Ferrell Jr.
Music by: Trevor Jones
MPAA Rating: R for sexuality / nudity, violence and language.
Distributed by: Strand Releasing
Release Date: May 15, 1998
Hits: 199
