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Paul Schrader's Master Gardener is a Provoking but Insecure Study of White Supremacy


After a serene opening credits, Paul Schrader’s new movie, Master Gardener, begins exactly how you’d expect: on a shot of a man handwriting a journal at a desk by lamplight. It’s a veritable cliché with Schrader at this point, each movie he makes has to have something of that Winter Light-influenced imagery in tandem with the “man in a room” structure of character exploration he’s virtually made his own. At this point it is still a feature not a bug of his approach -stirringly composed and substantively curious; and he uses it sparingly here compared to something like First Reformed although it is just as important. Master Gardener marks the third in what Schrader considers a kind of thematic trilogy, consisting also of First Reformed and The Card Counter -all movies that centre on isolated, outwardly apathetic men internally wrestling with an all-consuming anxiety related to some troubling facet of modern society, be it the climate crisis, the repercussions of the War on Terror, or… well, we’ll get to it. Certainly, there’s a dimension to Master Gardener that feels like it is his last statement in this format, but you never know.
I don’t think Master Gardener is as successful as First Reformed, and perhaps not even The Card Counter, but it is at least intellectually captivating in a way that remains fairly unique to Schrader. Joel Edgerton stars as Narvel Roth, chief horticulturalist at an elite estate owned by Sigourney Weaver’s wealthy Mrs. Haverhill, who entrusts him with instructing her troubled and recently-orphaned biracial grand-niece Maya (Quintessa Swindell), to whom Roth eventually forms a romantic connection. What complicates the pronounced Great Expectations dynamic at play here -apart from the little detail that Narvel is having an affair with Mrs. Haverhill- is the fact that Narvel is a former white supremacist, who considers himself reformed, yet has kept as a reminder and a warped kind of penance his extensive collage of fascist body tattoos.
Through both his voiceover narration and in his instructions to a small class of student gardeners, including Maya, Narvel talks in a lot of provocatively articulated gardening metaphors: laying seeds, tending to growth, weeding what doesn’t belong -vague enough analogues that equate to fascist dogma, ideas rooted in a supremacist mindset; an easy adjustment for Narvel given what he had been indoctrinated into. He still sees the world through such rigid rules and structures -a tenuous perspective still teetering in the direction of Nazi ideology. Schrader doesn’t imbue Narvel with the same ethics as he does his previous two protagonists -both of whom, though carrying darkened souls, had a tighter grasp on fundamental morals -they were on the right side of their respective turmoils. In some ways, Narvel is more fascinating for this mystique, someone to be suspicious of -even as he expresses modest shame over his history. The relationship with Maya, which develops in compelling though unnerving ways, is likewise tinged with a great deal of tension. Up to and even beyond her discovery of who he was, there’s a disturbing undercurrent to their quasi-romance deriving from those tethers of white supremacy that still have a certain relevance to Narvel. His attraction to her provokes notions of power dynamics, fetishization, even grooming (she is a good twenty years younger than him, and still referred to as a teenager by her grand-aunt). Schrader intends such subtexts and that wary mood, especially as it concerns Maya’s dependence on Narvel when kicked off the estate and in danger of falling back into the grasp of her former drug cronies and addiction, as well as the subversion of her subsequently asserting sexual power over Narvel in light of her knowledge of his secret. It’s very interesting stuff but Schrader doesn’t entirely know what to do with it. One gathers he doesn’t feel so strongly about this topic as he did those of First Reformed and The Card Counter –merely that the character himself is what fascinated him.
But even taking into account his ruminations, Narvel is not much of a transparent character and Schrader doesn’t do much to explore his identity as it relates to his former life. There are a couple flashbacks that reveal how he left his Nazi cult after refusing to murder a black mother and child (though the father he was okay with killing); but these don’t factor much into any real kind of reflection or reconciliation on his part in the present. He is uncomfortable with mores of white supremacy, but we don’t know why -how did he go from dehumanizing an entire ethnicity to falling for someone of it? Edgerton is pretty good and suitably disconcerting, but there’s not so much depth to be mined there as he and Schrader seem to think. In some respect this makes him more compelling as a probable villain, but I’d wager that’s not what Schrader intends. As with his other films, there’s a clear current of redemption to Narvel’s arc, as he twice saves Maya, gets revenge on her abusers, and repudiates her grand-aunt. If there is meant to be moral ambiguity in this, or if he is supposed to be a challenging image of a sympathetic fascist, it doesn’t translate. He is shown only to be a haunted man whose principal struggle with his soul was won before the movie started -in spite of those creeping persisting strands that Schrader resists interrogating.
His technique is still thrilling though, even where his script and ideas fall short. Schrader’s compositions remain very particular and evocative. Take one scene, the one of sexual submissiveness I alluded to earlier, that is framed like Rembrandt’s Prodigal Son. Another of Narvel looking over a sleeping Maya, also lit in a Rembrandt fashion, recalls the spiritual imagery of Dreyer or Bresson. Of course, each Schrader movie is in some way spiritual and so many shots in this movie are characteristic of that -there’s obviously some cross iconography on Narvel’s back, lovingly stroked by the racist Mrs. Haverhill. The Great Expectations allusions are more than narrative, David Lean’s 1946 film seems also represented here in a few visuals, and where the crime elements are considered, some of that Scorsese blocking seen in those classics Schrader wrote. Most interesting though is the surreal moment, a concept Schrader wholly admits is borrowed from Bresson, wherein the realism is interrupted by a moment of heightened spontaneity to relay a dramatic emotional or psychological beat. Here it takes the form of a jubilant nighttime drive expressed through an abyss of colourful animated fauna guiding their way. It certainly succeeds at its aims, a gorgeous sequence imbued with emotional clarity in stark contrast to the rest of the film.
This review may sound harsh, but Master Gardener is still a thoroughly engaging film, if not as provocatively fleshed out as it ought to be given the material it deals in and the character it centres on. Curious, but with a rather mediocre statement. Gardening is employed in the film as metaphor and I wonder how much Schrader thinks of himself as a gardener -interested by aesthetics, aura, and by technique more than what it’s all in service of.

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