Master Gardener: an uncharacteristically hopeful offering from Paul Schrader

• Reviewed from the 2022 Venice International Film Festival.

All it takes is for an unsmiling man of evident self-discipline and slicked-back hair to sit at a spartan desk and begin to write in a journal, and you know you’re in a late-period Paul Schrader movie. In the deeply peculiar but from certain angles fascinating Master Gardener, the third film in a thematic trilogy with First Reformed (2017) and The Card Counter (2021), the man is Narvel Roth (Joel Edgerton, blunt and superb as ever) and the desk is in the monastic shack he occupies in the grounds of the grand estate whose gardens he oversees. The hair is side-parted and severe, and the journal entries are mostly composed of horticultural observations, intoned in Narvel’s uninflected voiceover so tersely that they take on the metaphorical heft of haikus.

But this would not be a Paul Schrader film if that were all there is to Narvel. Underneath his carefully concealing clothes there is writing of a far uglier sort, tattoos that cover his torso in white supremacist slogans and swastikas. Narvel is a reformed neo-Nazi, who some years prior turned on his former gang and now has been hidden away by his minder, Deputy Neruda (Esai Morales), in this unlikely job under this unlikely name. At Gracewood Gardens he has found, if not peace, then equilibrium and a vocational aptitude for gardening, which has gained him the loyalty of his small, diverse staff. His green thumb also appears to be the main reason he enjoys special attention from Norma (a fabulously haughty Sigourney Weaver), the lady of the manor – well, that and a shared tendency toward neatness, him in spotless overalls tucked into somehow tidily muddied boots; her in pressed, pleated pastels with an occasional cardigan over her shoulders her only concession to casualness.

Soon, though, we’re shown how much weirder that relationship is. Sometimes, Narvel is summoned to Norma’s bedroom, where, when he disrobes to reveal the tattoos he’s ashamed of but perversely – perhaps self-punishingly – has not had removed, Norma’s eyes glitter. Horribly enough, it’s with something other than horror. So it’s not surprising that when Norma orders Narvel to take on her estranged grandniece Maya (Quintess Swindell) as an apprentice, she does so with evident distaste for the young woman’s mixed-race heritage. There are moments of violence that occur later in this oddly shaped redemption narrative, but none is more vicious than Norma’s brittle, entitled, racist disdain, especially once sharpened by sexual jealousy when she perceives the attraction between Maya and Narvel.

Never one to shy away from controversy, here Schrader runs toward it and gives it a big hug, in the brazenly multi-level-triggering relationship that blossoms between a fortysomething white guy with “White Pride” emblazoned across his shoulders and a Black woman half his age who is introduced to us in a “No Bad Vibes” t-shirt. Even without the racial and age-gap politics, Maya and Narvel’s romance would be problematic: once again, Schrader has only sketchily outlined a preternaturally forgiving female character who exists mainly as a conduit for a sinner-man’s redemption.

Yet there’s an interesting remove at work here, encoded into the unconvincing chemistry (avuncular rather than romantic) between the actors, the muted photography, the clipped, non-naturalistic dialogues and the gardens shown not in riotous splendour but in dry, brown die-back periods. Master Gardener is strangely abstract, which damps down many of the real-world tensions it presumes to invoke and then doesn’t much care to explore. The nature of Narvel’s past sins is of less interest to Schrader than the fact of them, as a kind of cosmic imbalance that needs to be righted through atonement. The difference this time is a seed of very un-Schraderian optimism, late in a career more often defined by despair or nihilism or religiously accented torment.

Along with the general air of unreality, this uncharacteristic hopefulness makes Master Gardener, with its obvious metaphors and archetypes, into a kind of fairytale, in which Narvel is the princess in the tower, Norma his cruel captor, and Maya the rescuer, whose kiss can set him free. Sometimes the fantasy gets clumsy, as when Narvel buries his head in Maya’s, erm, lady garden, and is suddenly hallelujah-ing down a nighttime highway lined with garish CG flowers. But mostly the pruned-back simplicity makes a fable out of a fraught scenario the way a designer makes a formal garden out of a wilderness. It’s a vision of the world not as it is, but as Schrader might, surprisingly, wish it were: with all the weeds pulled out, where there’s no nature – however overgrown with hatred and violence – that love and good pair of secateurs cannot tame.