As many of his protagonists write in journals, savoring their routines as a means of holding demons at bay, Paul Schrader retraces the same essential narrative over and over, mining new mineralities. This deliberate repetition has evocative as well as limiting qualities: Schrader understands the rituals of people with awful pasts, especially recovering addicts, and he gets deeper into these psychological states with each of his neo-transcendentalist productions. On the other hand, Schrader also keeps repeating his bad ideas, namely his need to graft a halfhearted vigilante fantasy onto most every project, regardless of context. Yes, even a film called Master Gardener ultimately pivots on a man having to take out the macho trash.
The first hour of Master Gardener is peak Schrader. As in his best films, not much seems to be happening, but there’s a wealth of mystery and psychodrama beneath the surface. Narvel Roth (Joel Edgerton) is the head gardener for an estate owned by Mrs. Haverhill (Sigourney Weaver). Everything about the lonely Narvel is self-consciously austere and fastidious. He sits at a wooden desk, a glass of water by his side, and writes into, natch, a journal. Mostly he describes flowers and the histories of gardens, offering this inside baseball with a rueful confidence that’s weirdly hypnotic. Filmmakers often undervalue the appeal of unconventional texture in a narrative, of telling us how things we don’t know about work. Narvel’s flower reveries speak of his hard-won victory over past chaos, and Schrader’s tight and elegant framing, heavy on unemphatic medium shots, mirrors Narvel’s tough, unadorned prose and deliberate diction.
Narvel’s narration contrasts poignantly with the emptiness of everything else. Like many inhabitants of Schraderland, Master Gardener’s characters talk in functionalities that are delivered with scant emotiveness. The idea is to emotionally alienate viewers so that they intellectually digest the film’s patterning, recognizing its motifs and themes as Narvel might recognize the overlap between nature and control that constitutes the gardens he tends.
It doesn’t take a cinephile to see that gardening is a representation of artistic pursuits at large, of how the creation of art lends a tormented artist a sense of control and order—of sanity in the roiling chaos of his psychological state. When Schrader is at the top of his game, this sense of emotional denial is ironically moving, which is to say emotional anyway. That’s the paradox of the movies that Schrader analyzed in his 1972 book of criticism, Transcendental Style in Film, and for an hour or so Schrader achieves such a paradox in Master Gardener, as he did most recently in First Reformed and in stretches of The Card Counter.
If you accept that plot and conventional emotion aren’t the game in Master Gardener at first, you become attuned to unusual details that speak louder than a grabby narrative or actorly histrionics. It’s moving how Narvel and his assistant gardeners walk within the frame—stiffly yet elegantly, their every gesture communicating a gratitude for order. Also moving is the degree of detail with which Narvel discusses lunch rituals to someone new to the estate, from the snack and drink routine to the bakery that delivers sandwiches. Famously religious a lifetime ago, Schrader understands the contentment of attending to small things with exactitude, of choosing to define your life by things that should be noticed but usually aren’t. Such obsessiveness unites priests with addicts, and Master Gardener emits a profound “recovering addict” energy, even if the actual recovering addict who eventually appears on screen is unconvincing.
Dynamics gradually crystallize. Narvel and Mrs. Haverhill are occasional lovers, and he’s permitted, by the standards of other employees, to speak to her frankly. Weaver’s role is small, but she makes a remarkable impression, recognizing that Haverhill’s modulated speech is a way of keeping her rage in reserve. When Haverhill loses control of that rage, Weaver renders her both scary and pitiful. Why so angry? Haverhill’s convoluted family history is one of disappointment, passive aggression, and money squabbles that resurface in the form of her beautiful grandniece, Maya (Quintessa Swindell). A triangle develops between Narvel, his wealthy and cultured older employer, and his biracial and much younger new apprentice. And, yes, Maya’s racial identity very much matters to Master Gardener’s grand plan.
When we don’t know what’s going on, Schrader’s austerity feels like an existential fashion statement. As the film grows more plot, it becomes evident that the director hasn’t figured these characters out as well as one might have hoped. Schrader is great at writing lonely middle-aged and elderly men, but his younger characters tend to be bland. Maya especially is never more than a symbol: of youthful possibility, of how people’s damages can rhyme, of the potential for forgiveness, and especially of the exhilarations of sleeping with young women as an older man.
As such, it’s a shock when Schrader reveals that Maya is a drug addict, not because the twist has been carefully planted but because nothing in the writing or acting of the character suggests it. Maya appears to be a diligent student and employee with none of the chaos of addiction—a contrast that might have fruitfully underscored Narvel’s own secret. Yes, addicts can hide their dependencies with astonishing skillfulness, but here it feels like an afterthought. Or, to be blunt: Maya feels like the creation of an aging man who’s never been all that great at writing women.
The interlocking nature of Maya and Narvel’s secrets is Schrader’s biggest provocation in Master Gardener. We learn early on why Narvel solely wears long-sleeved shirts, as he’s a reformed white supremacist with racist tattoos all over his torso. As he and Maya become closer, we’re in suspense as to when she will figure out his identity. When she learns of his past, they fight and quickly meet common ground. The actual cultural differences between these characters is of virtually no interest to Schrader beyond glib metaphorical dimensions. Later, Maya asks him if she can strip, which Narvel allows. Then Maya orders him to strip, outing his sickness definitively as well as his terrific muscled body. Narvel gets on his hands and knees while Maya stands expectedly and crawls over to her, presumably to go down on her. So, a white supremacist atones for his sins by servicing a biracial woman old enough to be his daughter. The idea is so outrageous, so rooted in intellectualized, calculatedly offensive horny-old-man fantasies, that it’s amazing that Philip Roth or Norman Mailer didn’t get there first.
This critic would love to report that Master Gardener is as scandalous as Schrader wants it to be, as he’s exploring not only his personal kinks but the notion of forgiveness in a world that fetishizes persecution, self-righteous indignation, and demographic optics above the nuances of actual human behavior. But Narvel and Maya’s relationship isn’t visceral enough to get under your skin, especially given that Narvel’s white supremacy past is as contrived as Maya’s drug addiction. Edgerton is quite vivid in Master Gardener’s first half, but he doesn’t conjure a sense of past or dormant evil, as Willem Dafoe does effortlessly in his own collaborations with Schrader. You never have to contend with the fact that the protagonist truly was a white supremacist, as you did in Edward Norton’s startling performance in American History X.
There’s a ballsy element of self-interrogation to the notion of a Paul Schrader movie being entirely set in a garden, eschewing the fire-and-brimstone machismo that’s as intrinsic to his aesthetic as the transcendentalist stuff. And the filmmaker initially rises to the challenge, rendering the cultivation of plants hypnotic and personal and reflective of deep regret and mortality and of newfound, cleansing honor. It’s a pity, then, that Master Gardener has to eventually uphold the obligations of the Schrader vigilante schtick anyway. Around the time that Narvel threatens Maya’s drug dealers with a pair of garden pruners, telling them that he’s done an awful lot of pruning in his day, the film slips full on into self-parody. Which is to say that, at its worst, Schrader’s is less Master Gardener than Master Bater.
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