For a writer and director who enjoys traversing the murkiness and repressed violence lurking in the human soul, Paul Schrader’s latest film, Master Gardener, is quite pleasant. That especially comes as a surprise after the dourness of his last two films, First Reformed and The Card Counter. Yet Master Gardener still manages to form, with its predecessors, a quasi-trilogy in Schrader’s filmography: As in those two films, Schrader sets Master Gardener up with another stifled man, alone in a room, ruminating on the state of the world through the lens of his occupation.
This time around, Schrader has chosen to focus on a gardener, Narvel Roth (Joel Edgerton). Narvel presides over the sprawling Gracewood estate somewhere in the American South. Gracewood Gardens is well-respected, making a name for itself with annual fundraising galas that draw in hundreds of thousands of dollars. The estate is owned by Norma Haverhill (Sigourney Weaver), a hardheaded and obstinate dowager, who is as vehemently focused on Gracewood’s reputation as she is on Narvel’s behavior.
At a Q&A screening after the film’s North American premiere at the New York Film Festival, Schrader described Master Gardener as “a southern fable”; the director later quipped it was a moniker he added to ward off critics, who would immediately question the film’s believability. “You don’t have to believe it, you just have to imagine it,” Schrader told the audience.
What makes watching any Paul Schrader film for the first time such an exciting experience is knowing that, whatever you’re about to see, it’s going to have no regard for anything other than Schrader’s own vision. That’s certainly true for Master Gardener, a film that has no fear roaming controversial and sickening subjects but leaves their inherent brutality lingering in the past. While it may not be the most striking entry into his late-period trilogy, it’s teeming with a noticeable softness, as Schrader seeks to find where love can bloom in an increasingly unforgiving world.
Like many of Schrader’s characters, both inside this trilogy and over his vast career as a writer and director, Narvel searches for personal redemption. Though he may have found it at Gracewood Gardens, sleep continues to evade him, haunted by nightmares of a past life. It’s not until we watch him go to his mirror in the middle of the night that the reason why Narvel is the only one at Gracewood wearing long sleeve turtlenecks in the middle of July becomes clear: His torso and back are covered in Proud-Boy, neo-Nazi ink insignia.
Schrader understands that the intrinsic level of hate associated with these symbols will make the audience’s stomachs fall, especially when Narvel is summoned to the porch to have a conversation with Norma. She tells Narvel of her troubled, biracial grand-niece, Maya (Quintessa Swindell), who has hit a wall after inheriting psychological trauma passed down from her recently deceased addict mother; she’s fallen into her own patterns of drug use and bad behavior. Norma wants to bring Maya to Gracewood to teach her the ways of the garden—how working with it can be not just corrective but also restorative—in the hopes of putting her on a new path.
But Norma seems well aware of Narvel’s history, implying that the main reason she wants to put Maya under his tutelage is to have him instruct her of the therapeutic ways of the estate—work which managed to reform him years ago. When Maya arrives, she’s markedly different from everyone around her. She doesn’t carry the haughtiness of her grand-aunt or the reserved demeanor of Narvel, preferring trendy prebiotic sodas with her lunch and unwilling to let any sugar-wrapped insults lay on her shoulders. Still, she takes to Narvel’s lessons about the garden immediately, excelling in her work every time she puts hand to soil.
Maya’s troubles, however, have followed her to Gracewood, making it impossible for her to focus on rehabilitation. Narvel knows all too well that salvation is harder to attain when entrenched in the sins of your past. Seeing an opportunity to guide a lost soul before her transgressions become permanently tattooed onto her life, Narvel unearths impulses from his violent past, so Maya can have a shot at a future.
Schrader’s decision to explore race in post-Trump America through the lens of his signature, hardened storytelling will certainly (and probably rightfully) prickle some. But Master Gardener manages to avoid feeling sanctimonious, even when its messaging becomes overly literal. “The seeds of love grow like the seeds of hate,” Narvel writes in his journal at one point, Edgerton’s voiceover bonking the film’s themes over the audience’s head like a sack of freshly harvested potatoes. Just as often as he spoon-feeds the meaning to us verbatim, however, Schrader pulls back to let his actors communicate it for him.
Edgerton is quite wonderful here, relaxing into Narvel’s newfound gentleness with an arresting yet quiet charisma. At the NYFF screening, Schrader referred to Edgerton as a “lug,” a nice intersection between Oscar Isaac’s gruff war interrogator in The Card Counter and Ethan Hawke’s overwrought reverend in First Reformed. Edgerton is broad but malleable, the perfect actor to portray the white-knuckled tension between Narvel’s past and present.
Sigourney Weaver, who wades into every scene with a perfectly coiffed bouffant and a wardrobe that looks like it smells equally of mothballs and Chanel No. 5, brings a mighty presence to Norma Haverhill. Norma’s politics are foggy; she has a pseudo-Freudian relationship with Narvel and refers to Maya’s place in her family as “mixed-blood,” but her only priority is the continued prosperity of Gracewood Gardens. Weaver plays Norma with a distinguished but humorous thorniness, a welcome sigh of relief from all of the invisible violence that hangs in the air, like gas ready to light at the first sign of a spark.
However, the real secret to Master Gardener’s ultimate success is Quintessa Swindell, who is endlessly magnetic as Maya. This film would simply not work if it weren’t grounded by an actress who understood how to gracefully drift through its complicated themes free from judgment. Maya seeks to make sense of her place in a dark world, where all odds are stacked against her. And though Maya is appropriately skeptical of Narvel’s kindness, Swindell imbues her with youthful compassion, as yet unhardened by all of the evil she’s experienced in her life thus far.
Master Gardener is not a rousing achievement, and it’s certainly the least-consequential entry into Schrader’s trilogy (which may soon become a tetralogy, if his purported plans for a follow-up come to fruition). It was shot in 20 days, and it certainly feels like it, with some noticeable continuity errors and pacing that doesn't give us much time to sit with the complex topics at hand. Schrader still hasn’t come close to recapturing the staggering immediacy of First Reformed; it remains his late-career opus, more distressing with each passing year.
But this film does have a lingering, inescapable beauty throughout. Bolstered by a fantastic, keyboard-heavy score from Dev Hynes, Master Gardener feels lost somewhere in time. It often moves and feels like a dream, retold and pieced together from fleeting, hazy memories. Schrader may be intent on quashing questions of his latest film’s believability, but for all of its absurdity, Master Gardener does find fertile soil to root in, somewhere in the fringe underbelly of reality. This is Schrader’s meditation on the hardness of pure love and pure hate—and all of the humanity that exists somewhere in between—in the garden of good and evil. If not well-tended, the latter spreads like rot. But in the right hands, even the most decayed soil can be capable of recovery.
