Order is a governing force in the cinema of Paul Schrader. Whether it’s Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver and Jake VanDorn in Hardcore striving, in their own demented way, to impose their morality within scummy, depraved cityscapes or Pastor Toller and William Tell in First Reformed and The Card Counter, respectively, finding solace within the spartan, rigidly organized settings of a church and a casino, order is a means for Schrader’s protagonists to escape their damaged psyches. In the writer-director’s latest film, Master Gardener, he employs the most logical and orderly of spaces, a garden, to serve as the ripe, knotty metaphorical battleground for another tortured loner.
Schrader’s anti-hero here is once again plagued by a troubled, violent past, and one that’s even more deliberately button-pushing than a suicidal priest. Joel Edgerton’s Narvel Roth is an ex-neo-Nazi, now in witness protection and working as the head gardener on the enormous southern estate of a dynamic and domineering heiress, Norma Haverhill (a frequently hilarious Sigourney Weaver). Their relationship is a twisted one, with her displaying great respect for his knowledge and skills as a horticulturist while also casually expecting sexual favors for helping to keep his past sins, and identity, permanently buried. Of course, when, in an act reeking of condescending white saviorism more than generosity, Norma has her biracial grand-niece, Maya (Quintessa Swindell), move in to work as Joel’s apprentice, the past has a way of working its way to the surface with all the persistence of a pesky weed.
At one point, Narvel muses that, “Gardening is a belief in the future—belief that things will happen according to plan.” It’s a sign of faith in a predestined future that one finds couched in many of Schrader’s films, which are often rife with the same strict Calvinist principles with which he himself was raised. Just as Narvel keeps the elaborate garden under his care obsessively trimmed and tidy, so too does Schrader keep his compositions. His mise-en-scène is sparser and more minimalist than ever, taking yet another step toward the transcendentalist style he wrote about in his 1972 book on Dreyer, Ozu and that other famed Calvinist director whose work he was so inspired by, Robert Bresson.
The spare visual style of Master Gardener serves a similar purpose as order in a garden, with a clean separation of the elements on screen and a removal of anything even remotely distracting or unnecessary. As such, the film functions primarily as a three-hander, with simple yet precise shots that leave nothing to interfere between Schrader’s expression of his themes, via dialogue and visuals, and the viewer’s reception of them. Such fastidiousness (some will inevitably say fussiness) in stripping away all but the essential is a rarity in modern American cinema, and while this approach leads to some moments that feel overly stilted or mannered, it’s a fascinating tactic that, for Schrader, feels like a further honing of his craft.
Throughout, Schrader deftly weaves in metaphors of gardening, delving into various philosophical tenets of the trade, quickly moving beyond the most obvious one involving rebirth and rejuvenation. One can see what Narvel, and Schrader, admire about the act of gardening, from the Zen quality of its demands for endless repetition and stringent care to the constant battle to contain and control the insanity and anarchy inherent in nature. And just as Narvel spends every day shaping the garden in a manner of his liking, so too does he attempt to do with his own life, trying to keep his old identity hidden and his new identity crafted and maintained, both for his own safety and to move on from the heinous beliefs he held and actions he made in the life he’s left behind.
Master Gardener is further animated by the distinct tension that arises from these clashes of polar opposites, which eventually, and in true Schrader fashion probably inevitably, includes even a romance between Narvel, with his back and chest still covered with a distressing variety of white supremacist tattoos, and Maya. It’s in this relationship that Schrader’s reputation as a provocateur is most apparent, yet he handles this story with such disarming tenderness and delicacy that it ends up being a far more captivating and surprising part of the film than the outbursts of violence we’ve come to expect in his work.
Ultimately, Master Gardener is about the futility and impossibility of maintaining the type of strict order and isolation that Narvel has accustomed himself to, and his journey is eventually as healing as it is circuitous. To paraphrase a line from the end of Bresson’s Pickpocket, which Schrader directly lifted for the finales of two of his own films, what a strange path Narvel had to take to find peace in his life. And what a potent reminder that few directors so consistently fuse themes of violence and redemption in as beguiling a manner as Paul Schrader does.
Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures
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