Master Gardener
Paul Schrader’s career as a writer and/or director is littered with tales of white guys trying to do good — by any means necessary. Robert De Niro’s ticking time bomb of a cabbie in Taxi Driver. William Devane’s one-handed Vietnam vet in Rolling Thunder (one of Quentin Tarantino’s favorite films). George C. Scott’s daughter-seeking porn-biz infiltrator in Hardcore. Richard Gere’s in-too-deep male escort in American Gigolo. Willem Dafoe’s crucified Son of God in The Last Temptation of Christ. Nick Nolte’s sanity-losing cop in Affliction. These men go to extreme lengths — often vengefully or violently — just to get some inner peace.
In Schrader’s latest, Master Gardener, Joel Edgerton plays … well, a master gardener. His Narvel Roth runs a small, diverse crew of gardeners at Gracewood Gardens, an estate owned by wealthy dowager Norma Haverhill (Sigourney Weaver), who calls Roth “Sweetpea” and often orders him to engage in some upstairs, after-hours activities with her. (Though the viewer doesn’t get to see any of that GILF-alicious action.) Haverhill gets her main horticulturist to take her estranged mixed-race grandniece Maya (Quintessa Swindell) under his wing. Maya unfortunately knows some sketchy drug-dealing fellas, but Narvel starts to bond with the wayward soul, teaching her the finer ways of gardening as well as how to get out of a hellish situation.
Gardener is the final chapter in Schrader’s “Man in a Room” trilogy. The series began in 2018 with Ethan Hawke as a tormented minister in First Reformed, and continued in 2021 with Oscar Isaac as a tormented gambler in The Card Counter. You wanna take a guess what kind of gardener Edgerton plays?
Acting like a less mumblesome Nick Nolte, Edgerton plays Roth as an efficient, quiet guy who, much like the first two protagonists in Schrader’s trilogy, lives a lonesome, regimented existence to mostly keep his inner demons at bay. And just like those protagonists, Edgerton’s character spends most of his alone time sitting at a table, writing in a journal full of musings — Roth is serious about that (plant)life — that we hear through voice-over. We also learn why Roth prefers to stay quiet about his past (yes, it’s wild), and why he sees Maya as an integral part of his redemption.
Although Gardener has bucolic, pleasing visuals (don’t be surprised if you feel like hitting an arboretum after seeing it), a quaint, levelheaded tone and a hip-but-tranquil score from Devonté Hynes (aka alt-R&B singer Blood Orange), it’s still an odd film. It’s like Schrader had two stories — one involving a salacious love triangle, the other involving a lost soul protecting another lost soul — and merged them together to make a hothouse hero’s journey. Weaver gets her Joan Crawford on here, amping up the petty scorn when her character gets jealous over Roth and Maya’s budding relationship. Swindell, playing a role Schrader originally wanted Zendaya to occupy, is also a revelation. Her flawed damsel-in-distress is not a ball of callow, selfish neuroses, but someone who puts in the work when it comes time for her to be on the straight and narrow.
Things get predictably vindictive in the third act, as Roth briefly breaks bad in order to retaliate against some disruptive (but lame) figures. It’s a familiar, albeit less bloody, road for Schrader, a bit of darkness before he closes things out, but not with the same sort of ending we’re accustomed to. It appears that, at 76, the old sumbitch is getting soft in his later years — he saves his most problematic, get-off-my-lawn takes for that temple of ass-backwards thinking: his Facebook posts. But instead of giving us another tortured white knight, determined to do the right thing or die trying, here Schrader gives us a man who is literally trying to make the world (or at the very least, his world) a better, more beautiful place.
