'Lawn Dogs': A Breed Apart By Michael O'Sullivan Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, June 5, 1998

Mischa Barton and Sam Rockwell develop an uncommon friendship in "Lawn Dogs." (Strand Releasing) Director: John Duigan Cast: Sam Rockwell; Christopher McDonald; Kathleen Quinlan; Bruce McGill; Mischa Barton; David Barry Gray; Eric Mabius; Tom Aldredge; Beth Grant Running Time: 1 hour, 41 minutes For nudity, sexual activity, the violent death of a dog, a brutal beating, a gunshot and a smattering of profanity

On a literal level, it is the story of an unlikely friendship between an affluent 10-year-old girl and the working-class 21-year-old man who mows her lawn in suburban Louisville, Ky. In a larger sense, it is the story of America and the ugly class distinctions that belie our mythology of equality and justice for all.

Devon Stockard (Mischa Barton) is a newcomer to Camelot Gardens, a gated community of cookie-cutter, Tudor-style homes with treeless lawns and just-planted azaleas. Her social-climbing parents (Christopher McDonald and Kathleen Quinlan) urge her to make friends with some of the neighborhood children (none of whom, ironically, are ever seen, with the exception of a strange little boy who dresses in Indian face paint and a makeshift astronaut helmet). "I don't like kids," she says. "They smell like TV."

She would rather secretly hang out down the road in the rusted trailer of Trent Burns (Sam Rockwell), a self-described "country bumpkin" and loner who is eyed with suspicion by her neighbors even as he is entrusted with the maintenance of their lush yards.

Trent is, in effect, an interloper in Camelot Gardens, advised by the development's security guard (Bruce McGill) to "clear it" with him first, if he must stay in the neighborhood past 5 p.m. But Devon is by equal measure an outsider, with her wide, alien face and bizarre behavior. There is something about her parents' world that will never be hers, revealed by such instances of "acting out" as a scene in which she dumps a plate of food into her daddy's tool chest and then urinates on the windshield of the family car.

While natural for these misfits to gravitate toward each other, it is just as natural for the status quo to reject this imbalance. It is not long before their innocent yet dangerous friendship jeopardizes both of them.

The fine way that this tale is spun by screenwriter Naomi Wallace (a Kentucky playwright and poet) defies all expectations. It meanders lazily over the terrain like a summer vine, but then rears up with ominous menace like a snake in camouflage as it nears the explosive and confrontational conclusion. With a painter's eye, director John Duigan fills the screen with image after exquisite image, ranging from the dreamlike to the nightmarish: A shot of smashed cookies with broken red frosting on the side of the road, covered with ants, is fraught with menace; an empty child's nightgown floating through the evening sky like a billowing cloud says more about yearning than pages of dialogue.

In the role of Devon, the young Barton is breathtaking. Her performance as a girl on the cusp of adolescence perfectly captures that age's mixture of precocity and immaturity, volatile forces that are both capable of driving her and Trent to the brink of tragedy and then devising their own salvation.

Rockwell is equally good as the emotionally and physically scarred outsider, a character that is never played for sympathy, but one that earns it as deeply as our respect.

At the dramatic denouement of the film, which has been set up like a contemporary fairy tale, Duigan introduces a dash of magic realism that may seem to some jarring and out of tune with the quirky yet realistic timbre of the work so far. To my mind, however, it is a fearless and radical artistic choice that only serves to define him and Wallace as storytellers of the highest order.