Movie info via Rotten Tomatoes:
Directed by Academy Award® nominee Paul Schrader based on his original screenplay, MASTER GARDENER follows Narvel Roth (award-winner Joel Edgerton), the meticulous horticulturist of Gracewood Gardens. He is as much devoted to tending the grounds of this beautiful and historic estate, to pandering to his employer, the wealthy dowager Mrs. Haverhill (three-time Academy Award® nominee Sigourney Weaver). When Mrs. Haverhill demands that he take on her wayward and troubled great-niece Maya (Quintessa Swindell) as a new apprentice, chaos enters Narvel’s spartan existence, unlocking dark secrets from a buried violent past that threaten them all.
Review:
In Master Gardener Paul Schrader tries to pull off his ideal trifecta: redeem an irredeemable character, create a believable romance between a white supremacist and a socially justice aware black woman, and create a parable of a reconstructed south. He almost pulls it off.
Master Gardener has all the elements Schrader finds fascinating- dream state cinematography and plot, a pulpy potentially violent catharsis, a monkish austerity of character, combined with a stripped down sincere directing style. Schrader has created the ideal incubator to explore his pet themes- love, hate, race and redemption in an unforgiving world.
The ascetics of Schrader shows sympathy for “God’s lonely man” as Travis Bickle defines himself in Taxi Driver– a marginalized human being who’s of this world and yet apart. Master Gardener reincarnates Bickle into Narvel Roth (a tight fisted, emotionally controlled Joel Edgerton) a recovering addict and neo-nazi living in the fringes of the witness protection program. Roth has tried to turn his bigotry, rage psychopathies into something more stoic, driven and professorial. He finds work as a gardener and after years of application can confidentially call himself a Master Gardener, an enlightened priest of horticulture, cultivating his wonderland garden in the almost mythic South, complete with a large plantation house, an overseeing rich matron (Sigourney Weaver) with Norma Desmond delusions and sexual avarice’s. There’s a lot in Roth that parallels Chance the Gardener of Being There.
Master Gardener is the third of an accidental trilogy that includes First Reformed and The Card Counter. The first was about a minister having a crisis in faith. The second, about a gambler with a brutal military past facing a crisis in conscious. Master Gardener has a character trying to transfigure himself through the adoption of new morals and ways of thinking. He’s trying to become the good man he never thought he could be. Like the others, Narvel has met a woman- Maya (Quintessa Swindell) that moves him, and offers a sort of redemption and grace through a purgative and potentially violent act. Unlike, the others, Schrader grants Narvel a mostly happy ending, his reward for dutifully cultivating the Garden of Eden blooming around a corrupted world.
The triangle formed between Norma, Maya and Narvel gets more complicated and troublesome as the threat of violence rises and falls. Maya has a drug and abuse history. Norma lives in a delusional, obsessive history that’s get mentally thinner as her vanity and control over Narvel deteriorates. Visually Schrader denotes Narvel’s entrapment in scenes that show him writing journal entries in the low ceiling servant house that barely allows for his seated in a chair bowed head. He both needs to stretch and escape.
The women do get meaty bits to perform. Norma gets her Desmond rants and digs. Weaver delivers them with a cultivated yet vicious panache. Swindell has the more impossible role. Her character carries a lot of weight emotionally and politically. Schrader doesn’t want to hamper her character down with big speeches on race and reconciliation or appeals that reassure the audience’s conscience. He is pretty much focused on showing Narvel soul sickness and somewhat redemption. That’s never truer than when Maya and Narvel drive off into the night and find their way lit by an effusion of gloriously multi-hued flowers, blooms that took root long ago in haunted ground.
Master Gardener gets a 3.5 out of 5 or a B+. it’s streaming on Hulu.
Credits:
Directed by
Written by
Paul Schrader
Produced by
- Amanda Crittenden
- David Gonzales
- Scott LaStaiti
Starring
Cinematography
Alexander Dynan
Edited by
Benjamin Rodriguez Jr.
Music by
Production
companies
- HanWay Films
- Flickstar
- Ottocento Films
- Northern Lights
- KOJO Studios
Distributed by
Release dates
- September 3, 2022(Venice)
- May 19, 2023(United States)
Running time
111 minutes[1]
Country
United States
Language
English
Budget
$4 million[2]
Box office
$1.4 million
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