Master Gardener

There are writers who have very specific tics. If you have seen that video of Aaron Sorkin’s work quoting from himself you will know what I mean. 

Stephen King does a specific thing (mostly) as does David Mamet and Quentin Tarantino. 

And then there is Paul Schrader, the man known for The World’s Loneliest Man. Schrader has been doing a specific type of thing since he wrote Taxi Driver. 

I haven’t seen all of them but I have seen most of them and if you have either seen a character writing in a diary or watched a movie with an oppressive narration that examines the dark heart of America you either watched a Paul Schrader movie or someone doing a parody or an homage to a Schrader movie. 

Extra points if the main character sits at a small desk under low light and the voice over tells us what he is writing in a diary. 

Anyway, Master Gardener is that. One other Schrader thing to note, his characters are always wretched and either irredeemable or as close to irredeemable as possible. 

The guy who wrote Taxi Driver, Hardcore and Raging Bull does not make lighthearted comedies. 

Schrader, like Mamet and Sorkin took to directing. Schrader mostly directed his own scripts but he’s also been a hired gun. 

And here in the sixth decade of his career he’s suddenly made a trilogy of films about his lonely man. 

First Reformed came out in 2017, The Card Counter (which had one of the most shocking moments in film that year) came out in 2021 and this followed in 2022. 

The Card Counter had a line in it that has stuck with me for two years. The main character is talking about abuse, “The body remembers. It stores it all.”

Schrader is that kind of writer. Not everything lands but when he hits you it’s a gut punch. 

Master Gardner has a secret similar to The Card Counter and the aesthetic of most of Schrader’s films. 

If you ever said to yourself that you would like to hear someone talk about the most esoteric elements of gardening for two hours then buddy have I got a flick for you. 

However, spoilers, this might be the first thing of his I’ve seen that suggests redemption is possible. A movie that believes horrific people can change.

Except … I’m not sure the main character of Master Gardner deserves redemption and I’m not sure he’s trying to earn it.

There is a surface level to this but I also felt like there was something else, growing under the soil. 

At the end of Taxi Driver, Robert Deniro’s Travis Bickle, a pathetic psychopath, kills some very bad men and is treated as a hero. He drives off with a girl he likes as the movie comes to a close.

But, if you missed Schrader’s point, he will tell you point blank that what we have seen in the movie is just Bickle’s first killing. The victims of the next one will almost assuredly be innocent people. 

What I’m left thinking about, days after seeing Master Gardner, is not that the protagonist was trying to be a better person but rather that he had a specific plan and executed it.

Is this ending a happy one? Does he ever deserve to be happy? 

This is an intriguing film and a fine thriller. But I am not sure it is the film I initially believed it to be.

Joel Edgerton’s Narvel Roth is a man who in his old life covered his body in offensive tattoos. But only now, in order to enact a new relationship is he willing to have them removed. 

Are these the actions of a man who is changed by love? 

I am suddenly reminded of The New Testament, You can’t put new wine in an old bottle, the new must be poured into a new vessel. 

And then I found myself thinking about the world where Roth has come from. And, considering this — what kind of person is Sigourney Weaver’s Norma Haverhill? Consider that she not only gave him a job and a place to live but that she also let him (ahem) tend to her garden. 

She certainly saw those tattoos and never once asked him to remove them. 

The friction between them would seem to be over once Edgerton announces his intention to marry Quintessa Swindell’s Maya Core. 

There is a violent episode, once again deftly handled by Roth. 

But I don’t think these three will be happy on the same property for long. 

Everything we see in the film shows us a man who has changed and perhaps been changed by love. 

But are the things we have seen true? 

There may have already been too much discussion of the Bible in this review but I would note that Schrader was raised by strict religious parents. 

So at another point Jesus talks of a farmer who throws out seeds on the ground and some of them are eaten by birds and some grow in shallow ground are destroye, some of them are choked to death by weeds and some are planted in good soil and grow into good plants. 

What I’m trying to say is that this movie supposedly has a happy ending but I don’t believe that Narvel Roth and his new bride are planted in good soil. 

I think they are out here, with us, among the weeds.