What an interesting fucking film.
This review also on Letterboxd.
So like… This is a film from the perspective of a ten-year-old girl who grows up emotionally neglected and isolated in a picture-perfect gated community — having survived a heart transplant, she is in many ways morbid and isolated from other children her age, and this is really driven home by the complete dearth of same-age children in her community but for a little boy who serves as a counterbalance for her presence on screen.
Where Devon (Mischa Barton) is quiet and contemplative, intrigued and engaged by different forms of violence and horror, this little boy shoots toy guns into people’s faces, he destroys glass and steals from things — her violence is intensely targeted and continuous but goes relatively unnoticed because she is so quiet, and most of all because she is a little girl, whereas he is a little boy.
Nonetheless, neither of them fit in this perfect community, made for perfect adults with perfect silhouettes and perfect lives — he doesn’t belong in it anymore than she does, and when he steals all the lamps from the community streets to smash them on the beach as part of his army play, he is so far from anybody’s minds as a suspect they don’t even mention his existence.
The film is primarily centred on the uncomfortably intimate dynamic between Devon and a 21-year-old man called Trent (Sam Rockwell), who is an outsider to the community and comes in to mow lawns there. Finding his trailer in the woods, she insinuates herself into his life because he’s the nearest person who treats her as a full human instead of the ornament she is expected to grow into as a little girl in a class community like this.
Devon has a funny sense of boundaries, doesn’t like children her age or understand how to relate to them, and she comes off as in many ways strangely mature for her age — as traumatised children tend to do — but also in many others incredibly naive. Trent at first turns her away, aware that associating with her won’t help his own isolation, but he does end up allowing her to come closer and they develop a sibling-like relationship, including him driving her one day to his parents and his own siblings some ways away.
Trent is interesting because like, he was a competitive diver as a youth, but his parents are poor and still with kids at home, his father on a veteran’s pension with one of his lungs destroyed by the impact of a diet on very little money — unlike the young people his age within the gated community, he knows he’s going to be unable to go to college, he knows he can’t afford it or put time into it while sending enough money back to his parents.
He’s fucking a local girl who is horrified at the prospect of other people knowing about their sexual relationship, and he frequently shows off to other local women who find him very attractive — when asked about it, though, he denies it, doesn’t admit to it, doesn’t let on. Similarly, he knows and clocks a local gay boy his own age, who flirts with him, they touch hands — and at one point in the film, Trent publicly kisses this closeted gay boy and bites him in the process.
He gives the gay boy what he desires — a kiss from Trent — while disguising it as the violence between men that the community will accept.
There’s so many other bits and pieces in this film I’m fascinated by like… It explores the class dynamics at play here between Trent and his family in their shitty house a ways away versus this highly affluent community, and there’s an interesting moment where the film contrasts the shitty cheap glass that in the gated community is allowed for him to use rather than the nice glasses, but in this poor home the explicitly described “nice glasses” resemble that one; the misogyny that affects Devon and the way that her parents talk so freely about her developing body and how boys her age will or won’t want to have sex with her because of her transplant scar, reducing her to her potential desirability; the way that the closeted gay guy subtly mocks his straight best friend while disguising his own queerness, and who is very reasonable compared to him while hiding in plain sight…
Like, God, God, there’s so much this film has to say about public-facing politics and interpersonal dynamics in a highly appearance-focused community like this one, on hidden versus outward-facing identity, on sexual mores, on the treatment of veterans, like…
So Trent’s father is very sick and is on a veteran’s pension and is dying — Devon asks if he’s dying from injuries he received during the Korean war, and Trent scoffs and says, no. It’s a shitty diet and the shitty treatment of war veterans that did this to him, and that’s why he’s dying, and he’s furious about it and like, especially because all the money he’s trying to earn from these awful, cruel rich people is going home to his family!
But then, later in the film, he hits the gay guy’s dog with his car (it’s ambiguous, but I think hitting the dog was by accident: he did then euthanise it by hitting it in the head with a big plank), and because it’s one of the only pieces of cloth he has in the back of his pick-up, he wraps the corpse in an American flag to bring it back to the community.
I’m fascinated with Trent’s sense of responsibility and nobility and ethics in this film, especially in that like… He didn’t have to bring the dog back. The dog got loose — they would never have known that the dog had even died if he hadn’t brought it back. But he not only brought it back but wrapped it up, and specifically wrapped it in the stars and stripes as they would a dead soldier, and it’s fascinating when like, it’s such a direct commentary on how this beloved rich person’s dog will be treated with so much more love and respect than soldiers who went off to fight in a futile fucking war, because nothing fucking matters.
I will also say that watching it was interesting because like… This was very obviously a class commentary, but because of the treatment of Trent by this community — there’s a scene where he’s on the doorstep getting the money for his lawn mowing and they won’t even open the door fully to pass him his money; Devon’s mother won’t let him use one of the nice glasses and has him use a separate one from under the sink; he sleeps with a girl from the gated community and the gay guy later ironically comments about him stealing “our women” while mocking his straight bestie; no one will let him use their bathroom; he is permanently scarred in a police violence incident where a cop with a grudge shoots him in the belly with a shotgun; the particularly terrible treatment of his veteran father most of all his dynamic with this young girl that leads to him getting beaten up by a gang of men from the community — I would be interested if in one version of the script it was intended that Trent would be played by a Black man.
Obviously this is a class commentary, I’m not saying none of the above couldn’t happen to a guy who’s white trash at the edge of these communities, but it felt like it could very easily be a racialised dynamic too, and particularly a commentary on the way that white communities like this treat Black people and particularly Black men’s labour.
But yeah, this film is also like… It’s got these picture-perfect, slightly uncanny wide scenes, these bright green lawns, and there’s a lot of fairy tale motifs including the end scene which is ambiguous as to whether this is a real and fantastical happening or something in Devon’s imagination.
This film is so rich and there’s a lot in it, and I saw a lot of myself in Devon as like… This creepy little traumatised child who’s SO WEIRD on account of the trauma and the neglect, and she’s such a mood.
Good movie! Enjoyed the movie! Recommend it!
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