Master Gardener (Film Review)

If there's one thing critics love to do, it's explain art through comparison. Countless filmmakers have faced the charge of being “like X by way of Y”—but few have weathered that particular affliction more than Paul Schrader. He's the guy who always rips off Robert Bresson, the one who wrote Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976), or even a pale shade of his own past self. With his latest directorial effort Master Gardener (2023), however, Schrader once more underlines that he's nobody's number two, finding bountiful meaning in the motifs that have defined his oeuvre.

Set initially in Gracewood Gardens, the expansive estate of wealthy dowager Norma Haverhill (Sigourney Weaver), Master Gardener centres on the titular master horticulturist, Narvel Roth (Joel Edgerton). Under Narvel's careful watch, the gardens have experienced a period of prosperous growth—another in a long line of Schrader protagonists defined by his meticulous practice of craft. In keeping with his canonical counterparts, its evident that Narvel finds his exacting routine therapeutic, a means of exorcising past demons.

Needless to say, Narvel has more demons than most. Schrader gradually parses out violence flashes of Narvel's history as a white supremacist in between present-day sequences of his days spent labouring in the garden and evenings spent thumbing at the Neo-Nazi symbolism inked across his body. That routine is thrown off with the introduction of Maya (Quintessa Swindell), Norma's grand-niece. Norma explains Maya's own troubled past to Narvel before proposing that Narvel provide her a position in the gardens, along with some much needed tutelage and direction. The fact that Maya is biracial is only the first barb in their student-master relationship. That Maya is first pictured wearing a t-shirt that proclaims “NO BAD VIBES” is grandpa Schrader's idea of a joke.

Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.

Schrader is on characteristically strong form here, leaning into the stark, stilted closeness of digital photography with a film that's as sparse as it is surprisingly tender. Even more minimal than his last effort, The Card Counter (2021), with each new frame you can feel Schrader sanding down his edges, the skeletal mise-en-scène and simple framing enabling him to further hone his thoughts on the healing power of process and kinship. The gardens further reflect Schrader's increasingly ascetic approach to craft, the binary juxtaposition of the bright spectacle of the flower beds and their functional utility as a part of nature paralleling the careful balance of Schraders' filmmaking.

For a film about floriculture and the potential redemption of white supremacists, the subject matter is appropriately thorny. Schrader contemplates, once again, what it means to be redeemed for acts of hatred and whether redemption is earned or given, staring squarely at the multitudinous questions and possible answers. But this isn't a film designed to outrage (though inevitably, it will). As found between the gruff straightforwardness of Edgerton's lug and the confrontational energy of Swindell's protege, there's a sweetness that's far more at the surface even than in First Reformed (2017).

As part of what makes up a loose latter-day trilogy for Schrader, with the aforementioned First Reformed and The Card Counter, Schrader is short on compromises and new tricks. If the thought of another main character sat at his desk journaling makes you baulk, this likely isn't for you. For everyone else, you're in for one of the more complex and rewarding films of the summer months. Fifty years on from his cornerstone text on the evolving styles of Bresson, Ozu, and Dreyer, it's gratifying to see Schrader's own blossoming late era continue to bear fruit.

Master Gardener is out in UK cinemas on May 26th, 2023.