Part of the appeal of The Master Gardener is how writer-director Paul Schrader manages to pull off this improbable film. It’s not supposed to work, and even after watching it twice, I don’t think it fully works, but it just makes this piece more engaging and strengthens its power. The film’s taut, dreamy atmosphere, its fleshy undertow, its rigorous grace, and Schroeder’s astounding brilliance that confronts questions of love, hate, race, and salvation head-on in a world unforgiving. There’s a lot to admire in awkward honesty.
Like many of Schrader’s stories, this one revolves around a man, an otherworldly human being. The man Schrader called “God’s Lonely” in Taxi Driver is a recurring figure in his filmography. That lonely man is here again, rising again in The Master Gardener, but now named Narvel Ross, played like a fist by Joel Edgerton. Stoic, action-packed, and cautious, Narvel works as the chief horticulturist at her Gracewood Gardens. Gracewood Gardens is a cultivated wonderland of meticulously planned plantings and chilling chills somewhere in the American South.
The Master Gardener is the third installment in what Schrader described as a fortuitous trilogy, beginning with the 2018 drama First Reformed and starring a pastor (Ethan Hawke) in crisis of faith. ), and continued until “The Gardener” three years later. Card Counter is a story about a gambler (Oscar Isaac) with a cruel military past. In all three films, the lonely, soul-weary man in crisis (usually seen alone in his room, narrated and writing in his diary) undergoes some sort of transformation. Each man encounters an inspiring woman and experiences purifying violence (an indirect and disturbing literal), and through both, each gains grace, or something like it.
Narvel doesn’t seem to be in crisis at first glance. The garden he tends is owned by Norma Haivahill, the conceited and arrogant mistress who flirted with Sigourney Weaver’s fearsome master. Her Norma employees all refer to her as Mrs. Heyvahill. Its spooky mansion, the Plantation House, reminds me of the neater Miss Havisham of the South. Her name, on the other hand, is a decidedly cinematic reference to Norma Desmond, another wealthy woman who rattles around in her mausoleum that she spent her life building. It seems like But unlike Desmond’s garden, Norma’s garden falls short of seeding, to borrow Schrader’s dominant trope. Part of the reason is that Navel is nothing if not a compulsory worker.
