Paul Schrader (2022)
Master Gardener completes Paul Schrader’s so-called ‘man in a room’ trilogy, following First Reformed (2017) and The Card Counter (2021). I’ve not caught up with the latter but this new film is a sizeable disappointment after First Reformed. Schrader made his cinematic name writing about another man in a room – about what happens when Travis Bickle, increasingly obsessive and unhinged, emerges from his room and the yellow cab he drives, and tries to impose himself on New York City and right its wrongs. Like Travis in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) and the Reverend Ernst Toller in First Reformed, Narvel Roth (Joel Edgerton), the protagonist and title character of Master Gardener, keeps a diary-cum-journal but his jottings, compared with those of his screen predecessors, tend to the pretentious. Travis Bickle was too desperate for that; Ernst Toller was conscious of writing in a confessional tradition that, to some extent, went with his job. But when Narvel commits to paper gobbets of horticultural philosophy – gardening is ‘a belief in the future … an act of faith’, a matter of bringing order out of disorder, and so on – he’s expressing clichéd thoughts that soon feel like padding. What’s more, the thoughts (spoken by Joel Edgerton in voiceover) have the ring of ventriloquism – of Schrader using Narvel as a metaphorical mouthpiece. There’s a bigger problem with Master Gardener, though. To make any kind of sense, it needed to focus less on the man in the room than on the young woman joining him there and discovering who he really is – or used to be.
Narvel has worked for some years as horticulturist of Gracewood Gardens, the home of wealthy, widowed, childless Norma Haverhill (Sigourney Weaver). The story appears to be set in the present day but the place’s name has a salvationary flavour and the Haverhill mansion the look of a former plantation house. (The film was shot on various locations in Louisiana.) It’s clear from an early conversation between them that Narvel’s employer is a racist bigot. A familial obligation of sorts impels her instruction that Narvel take on her grand-niece, Maya, as an apprentice gardener but she’s evidently pained to inform him that her relative is mixed-race: thanks to Maya’s father’s ethnicity, Mrs Haverhill considered her single-parent mother, who has recently died, a doubly fallen woman. Within a few more screen minutes, it’s clear also that the master gardener was once a white supremacist. He became Narvel Roth when he entered witness protection, after refusing to kill a Black preacher’s wife and daughter, and betraying vicious comrades.
Narvel bears physical proofs of his past. He’s covered in tattoos – slogans, swastikas, a skull as a chest centrepiece. The first scene that exposes his upper body takes place in Mrs Haverhill’s bedroom, thereby revealing too that she’s aware of Narvel’s former identity and uses him for more than his green fingers. The arrival of Maya (Quintessa Swindell) triggers not only racial tension but also sexual jealousy on her great-aunt’s part, even before the young woman and Narvel have grown close. The newcomer, although an unwilling pupil, has a warmer welcome from other members of the gardening team (Victoria Hill, Amy Le, Eduardo Losan) – none of whom knows about Narvel’s earlier life. Maya travels daily to Gracewood Gardens from the housing project where she still lives. She’s drugs-dependent, with a dealer, RG (Jared Bankens), who metes out violence as well as supplying narcotics. After Maya turns up one day with a facial injury, Narvel approaches Oscar Neruda (Esai Morales), his caseworker within the witness protection programme, asking him to intimidate RG. That surprising request heralds plenty more snags in Schrader’s plotting. His screenplay here is much less carefully worked through than it was in First Reformed. For example, in the early stages of Master Gardener Narvel et al are preparing the gardens for an annual charity event that, for them and for Mrs Haverhill, is a highlight of their year. It looks set to correspond to the anniversary celebrations of the consecration of Ernst Toller’s church in First Reformed but Schrader more or less abandons the charity event once it becomes a narrative obstacle.
Master Gardener majors in recurrent Paul Schrader preoccupations – regret, redemption, vigilantism. He knows it; he knows that we (that is, viewers reasonably familiar with his work) know it too. There are moments in this new film when Schrader exploits audience expectations in order to subvert them. When Mrs Haverhill wrongly assumes that Narvel and Maya are already having an affair, she fires them immediately and they go on the road together. Receiving word that RG and his sidekick, Sissy (Matt Mercurio), have, in his absence, vandalised Mrs Haverhill’s gardens (this conveniently puts the tin hat on preparations for the charity event), Narvel returns to Gracewood to collect a gun. He then drives with Maya to the housing project but the Taxi Driver-like bloodbath that we anticipate doesn’t materialise (although the terrorised RG and Sissy do get their legs broken).
Schrader’s no doubt also aware that plenty of what happens in Master Gardener strains credibility. His justification for this is presumably that he’s interested not in realistic possibility but with the possibility of redemptive transformation and renewal. Yet the particular race-based scenario he uses to illustrate and dramatise that possibility carries with it, I think, a responsibility to address Maya’s, as well as Narvel’s, feelings about their relationship – a responsibility that Schrader largely ignores. That both is a moral evasion and severely limits as drama the story he tells. In their motel room Narvel, thinking that Maya is asleep, takes off his shirt to write his journal. There’s no good reason for him to drop his guard in this way except, of course, for Maya to wake and see his tattoos. She’s appalled but Narvel insists that he has changed and they have sex for the first time. That same night, Maya tells Narvel he must get rid of the tattoos. Schrader appears to think – though it’s hard to believe he really does – that this snatch of dialogue is enough to put to bed (no other phrase for it) the very difficult issue at the heart of the plot: a young woman of colour enters into a sexual relationship with a man whose body proclaims his hatred of non-white bodies.
Narvel doesn’t, despite Maya’s request, have the tattoos removed. He may well regard them as multiple marks of Cain that must always remain part of him but what does Maya think about that? This doesn’t matter to Schrader because Maya is a means of interrupting Narvel’s determined solitariness, virtually the instrument of his eventual salvation but not an independent character. In the final showdown between them, Narvel tells the vanquished Mrs Haverhill that he and Maya are getting married. Mrs Haverhill brands the match ‘obscene’; Narvel replies that he knows from personal experience what true obscenity is. Although it would be going too far to say that’s more than can be said for Narvel’s creator, Schrader’s neglect of Maya’s point of view verges on repugnant.
Master Gardener is, in mood and appearance, disappointingly monotone. DP Alexander Dynan’s images are mostly drained of colour. (The rare exceptions are a few of Mrs Haverhill’s outfits, a sunshine-yellow dress that Maya wears for a lunch with her great-aunt, and shocking-pink, computer-generated flowers blooming luminous on the roadside during a brief, ecstatic night-time car journey made by Narvel and Maya.) The scrupulously glum palette doesn’t succeed in being emotionally oppressive: it just seems to draw attention to itself. The same goes for Schrader’s overuse of Devonté Hynes’s mournful music. Joel Edgerton’s performance is formidably disciplined but (for me, as usual with this actor) insufficiently expressive. Edgerton’s grim presence does, though, give Mrs Haverhill’s nickname for Narvel – ‘sweet pea’ – an added ironic kick. Sigourney Weaver’s playing is deliberate but casting her in the battleaxe role is effective in physical terms. Now in her early seventies, Weaver is still beautiful – which gives Mrs Haverhill’s envy of Maya’s youthful good looks, mixed with rancid loathing of her skin colour, a stronger charge. Quintessa Swindell does what she can with her deplorably underwritten role.
1 June 2023
