Narvel Roth (Joel Edgerton) sits at a desk in a dimly-lit room, writing in a notebook. In another movie, this would tell the audience little. However, in a Paul Schrader movie, it prompts laughter from a roomful of critics at the New York Film Festival’s press screening. The joke being, this is what Schrader does: put a man in a room, have him write down and narrate his thoughts. For Narvel, this sense of routine keeps his troubled past behind him. After spending years running away from a dark history as an enforcer for a White supremacist group, however, Narvel’s quiet new life in the garden unravels. It hurtles him back into a world of temptation, violence, and possibly, redemption. Schrader’s assured script and direction balance Sirkian melodrama with tense thriller. It’s an intoxicating enigma that’s both a return to form and departure for the 76-year old auteur.
Intended as the final film in a trilogy, “Master Gardener” is more than just an audit of how one man reckons with his sins. While it does build off the themes explored in “First Reformed” (2017), the first film in the trilogy, and “The Card Counter” (2021), the follow-up, “Master Gardener” is in some ways a throwback in mood and especially, in style. Schrader the director has always been a sneaky aesthete, using much more than the script to unpack the narrative. His first three films, “Blue Collar” (1978), “Hardcore” (1979), and “American Gigolo” (1980) formed an unofficial and oddball trilogy, brooding character studies that were also vibrant and of-the-moment. Schrader remains as dynamic today as he was at the start of his career. He is skilled at evoking high (“Gigolo’s” mod LA scene), low (the seedy streets of “Hardcore”) and in-between (the car factory in “Blue Collar”).
Schrader Carefully Constructs all of ‘Master Gardener’s’ Elements
In “Master Gardener,” he takes a step forward while nodding back to those diverse and divisive films. He employs an unsettling score (from Devonte Hynes) and stellar photography (Alexander Dynan is the cinematographer) to heighten the contrast between beauty and grit. So much of the film takes place in the vast Greenwood Gardens, a gorgeously-landscaped panorama. But the music fits perfectly with the last third of the movie. It foretells trouble when the gears shift to a road picture, making pit stops at highway motels and urban neighborhoods gentrification has left behind. It all has the look and feel of now. However, Schrader’s not striving to convey something topical or manipulate audiences’ feelings about the three main characters. Not all of the storytelling devices (flashbacks to Narvel’s past) or plot threads (a forced romantic angle) are elegant. But the taut “Master Gardener” earns the benefit of the doubt.
Everything in the film’s carefully constructed, and that’s just how Narvel has organized his new life, minimizing distractions and dysfunction. During the day, he tends to the garden of wealthy Norma Haverhill (Sigourney Weaver). At night, he occasionally eats dinner and sleeps with her. On one of these visits, Norma asks Narvel to mentor and train her grandniece Maya (Quintessa Swindell), whose mother has just died. Here, Norma reminds Narvel the chance she took on him, when he changed his name and sought a new life. Of course, with Norma, there are always strings attached. Weaver’s charged performance calls to mind the grandiose heroines that Joan Crawford used to play. When Norma is wronged (first by Maya, then by Narvel), her sharp tongue and fondness for swift retaliation are character compulsions that would’ve been right at home in one of Douglas Sirk’s 1950s family dramas.
There’s Always Room for Another Paul Schrader Film
Narvel rescues Maya not because he’s a savior, but because he feels a sense of duty. He perhaps follows the example set by Norma, his keeper, employer, and lover. In that regard, Schrader’s revisiting a theme from his breakthrough screenplay for “The Yakuza” (1974), in which men actually chop off fingers to demonstrate their loyalty to each other. The duty that Narvel owes Maya (and Norma) is based on companionship and grounded in a shared belief system, not unlike the men in “The Yakuza” who sacrifice limbs to prove their trust to each other. The physical violence that comes in “Master Gardener” is earned, not contrived as in “The Card Counter;” and when Narvel breaks the legs of the drug dealers who hurt Maya and vandalized the garden, it’s a telltale sign that he sees a future with her, and killing those men would not solve their problems.
Optimism is the most surprising plot twist in Scharder’s film. The happy ending here is more pronounced than in the previous two trilogy films. In the final shot, Narvel and Maya are back in the garden, embracing each other on the steps of the home he occupied as head gardener, the one which he told Norma that he’d live in with Maya, “as husband and wife.” Her objection to that plan led to the near-death spiral for all three of them. It’s inconceivable that any of the trio’s life will move in a straight line towards happiness. However, Schrader admires the collective effort. His sympathies don’t necessarily lie with the man in the room. They perhaps lie with the man and these women seeking peace and absolution. There’s enough space in that room for a man and a woman, apparently, just as there’s always room for another Schrader film.
“Master Gardner” is part of our continuing coverage of the 2022 New York Film Festival (NYFF).
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