Reviewed by PETER CALDER
Cast: Sam Rockwell, Mischa Barton
Director: John Duigan
Camelot Gardens, Kentucky, makes Pauanui look unkempt.
Beyond the manicured expanses of grass, studded with chattering sprinklers, the sterile dreams of the middle class fester in impossibly neat homes.
But dark doings and illicit passions smoulder within the walls of this kingdom
and 10-year-old Devon (Barton), a wide-eyed and precocious renegade, wants out. She befriends Trent, the lean and handsome twentysomething mowing contractor who tends the suburban seas of bluegrass.
Towing a handcart full of homemade biscuits to sell in the neighbourhood, she wanders into the wild lands beyond the subdivision's gates and ends up at Trent's drab trailer home in the woods nearby. It's not long before we discover that the scars they have in common are more than physical.
Duigan, the seasoned Australian whose Flirting and The Year My Voice Broke were memorable and affecting studies of teen torment, is on familiar thematic ground here, even if the landscape has changed. Working from a script by American poet Naomi Wallace, he crafts a tender, funny and quirky variant of the odd-couple movie which starkly highlights the emotional aridity of middle-class mores.
It's wonderful to watch Barton's Mischa turn from automaton to chirpy youngster as, for the first time, she's allowed to be whoever she wants. And though Trent never seems less than likeable and genuine, Duigan manages to prick our ingrown fears about relationships between adult men and pubescent girls.
There's more than a whiff of Jane Campion's Sweetie here and we're constantly on edge waiting for obvious outcomes which don't eventuate. At one point, Trent, denied the use of a homeowner's toilet, pees in a drink carton and props it up on the seat of his truck. We just know what's going to happen next; Duigan knows better.
At times the southern gothic is a tad overblown and Wallace's intensely verbal script makes for some top-heavy sequences. Stylistically, too, it's a little messy, flicking from poetical surrealism to gritty realism and back again and delivering an ending that is jarring and unsatisfactory.
In that regard, it lacks the simplicity and coherence of Duigan's earlier films, but it's nonetheless and engrossing and smartly observed picture.* * *
- Peter Calder, Weekend TimeOut, 12/12/98
