Master Gardener (2023)

Limits, boundaries, and melodrama in Paul Schrader’s new “man in a room” movie

Narvel Roth walks a line. His life is a balance between his past and present, and maintaining the boundaries he’s built to separate them. Today he is the head groundskeeper of a vast and resplendent Southern plantation garden, preparing for this year’s opulent fundraiser gala. In another life, he was a member of a violent Neo-Nazi gang. He was a killer then, pan-faced, strung out, and raw. 

Joel Edgerton plays Narvel, the latest “man in a room” protagonist from Paul Schrader, teetering on the edge of watery-eyed heartbreak and steely reservedness. The old Narvel’s rawness has transformed into vulnerability accentuated by his gratitude for a second chance at life, following his gruesome exit from the dark brotherhood of white supremacy. There are aspects of his character and the plotting that ought to feel too familiar: he’s a man with a grim past, and the past can’t be held back forever, and a woman’s attention aids his path forward. But Schrader, as he often does, weaves specificity, metaphor, and overt fantasy into Master Gardener’s recognizable cinematic types and tones, destabilizing what might otherwise be a tired story of redemption, violence, masculinity, self-discovery, and love. Schrader, too, walks a line, between cliche and transcendence.

Narvel’s second chance comes with conditions. His new life rests on his ability to maintain a precarious balance, between the freedom he has found in his connection with (and control of) nature, and his status as a kept man, endlessly indebted to Norma Haverhill, the madame of his home and workplace, Gracewood Gardens. She pushed him to find solace in gardening. She has come to innately trust his judgment. She calls him “Sweetpea.” 

Norma is aware of and titillated by Narvel’s past. She looks upon the ugly swastikas tattooed on his back and the corny white power markings on his chest with erotic fascination. She may seem another racist old white lady silently pining for the South’s mythical glory days, but Sigourney Weaver gives Norma startling depth through a simmering mixture of glee, rage, and high-tea propriety. She also clearly relishes the character’s quiet villainy. In Norma’s first scene, she refers to her biracial grand-niece Maya as “mixed blood,” with regret not for her phrasing, but rather the circumstances. But overshadowing the villainy, and what makes her so compelling, is a sense of Southern-gothic tragedy. She has her grand estate, her local celebrity, her galas, her servants, deference paid to her from all sides, yet she’s empty at the core.

A line is drawn connecting Norma with Narvel’s old Nazi running buddies. They are all paranoid and desperate; they may not be fully cognizant of their fading relevance but they know something has changed, something is wrong. So she objectifies Narvel’s skin, the record of his evil history. Does she wish she had such boldness? Does he exemplify a commitment she envies? Is she obsessed with his capacity for extremity, the ability to trade white power for soil and seeds? When she points a gun at Narvel late in the movie – granddad’s antique Luger – there’s enough edgy mystery to her to make you wonder whether she really might pull the trigger.

Of course, it’s optimistic fantasy to say that white supremacists are at all aware of their fading relevance, that they may ever accept that they are old, fucked up, dying off, capable of leaving space for love and natural beauty to blossom in their place. But Master Gardener makes no claim to realism. Like Gracewood Gardens, the movie exists in a constructed world, evident right from the opening credits, as gorgeous flowers open to full bloom in fast-forward. 

The character with the most work to do, the most ground to cover in this fake place, is Maya, played by Quintessa Swindell. Maya’s appearance completely drives the plot. She has been invited to work at Gracewood as a minimum-wage apprentice out of some combination of her great-aunt’s pity and obligation, as well as her misguided attempt to lift up a young woman experiencing a hard time—her mother, Norma’s estranged niece, has died of an overdose, and we learn later Maya is herself an addict. 

There are lingering glances and Maya flirts with Narvel a little, but they hold each other at a distance. He tells her “Everybody walks a line”—the key to Narvel’s continued existence has been setting rules and following rules. He immediately sees in Maya a fellow addict, and a woman in need of nurturing. She too may benefit from imposed limits and learning to balance all of life’s beauties, requirements, and complexities. Despite Norma’s faults, she gave him the gift of the garden. He wants to pass it on. When Maya comes into work with her face bloodied by her dealer/boyfriend, R.G., Narvel cares for her and bears witness to her while Norma refuses. 

Their attraction leads to their dual expulsion from Norma’s Eden around the film’s midpoint, and suddenly Master Gardener is a road movie, a tale of unexpected love, an addiction story, and a revenge flick. Maya sees Narvel’s tattoos and briefly rejects him, only to demand his atonement in a way that is unsexy, bluntly metaphorical, and totally absorbing. It takes many different and complicated forms, but Schrader always returns to the idea that people’s souls are better for having somebody to kneel before.

Maya seems to come from a version of reality foreign to Norma and Narvel. We need to buy the trade in allure and temptation between the three characters, and believe that Maya’s interest in Narvel is different, and better, than Norma’s. And of course there’s the fact that Maya is a black woman in her twenties, Narvel is a middle-aged reformed white supremacist, and Norma clings to the vestiges of a genteel, white-dominated South. If this were real, what are the odds Maya would spend a single second dealing with any of it? Though the movie falters somewhat under the huge weight it asks Swindell to shoulder, she does not.

 In its back half, Master Gardener crosses its own boundary. It is no longer contained by the rigors of garden work or Narvel’s obligation to Norma. They visit and discuss gardens as they drive around, aimlessly and haphazardly caring for each other until they eventually must face R.G. Narvel’s occupation takes a backseat, though. As with Schrader’s last two films, First Reformed in 2017 and 2021’s The Card Counter, in which Pastor Toller doesn’t do much preaching and William Tell doesn’t count many cards, the purpose of a person’s chosen vocation is malleable. Our pasts, though, are not—jobs (or hobbies, or callings) come with special knowledge, but they don’t exist in a vacuum. A job is only one link in life’s chain. It may inform our interactions or even personalities, and give us a sense of worth and belonging, but it could also lead us far from where we began, become stultifying, or rot.

During an interview at Lincoln Center following a recent double feature of First Reformed and The Card Counter, Schrader called Master Gardener “a fable,” a moral tale set apart from those two movies. I see that, but I think what really differentiates this movie is its turn toward melodrama. As much as it’s another examination of Schrader’s beloved “God’s lonely man,” his approach this time broadens the characters into types, places them into a heightened situation, and allows them to explore reality in imagined space. Paul Schrader has spent over fifty years blending references to Ozu, Bresson, Bergman, Hitchcock, and European existentialism into mainstream American cinema, but is this the closest he’s come to Douglas Sirk?

Sirk’s Hollywood melodramas of the 1950s were bold pictures, sometimes shot in expressive, lurid Technicolor. Even in their most crowd-pleasing modes, they could be surprisingly hilarious, outrageous, and emotionally knotty, as they tended to use beautiful people and their immaculate, impossible homes to subtly portray contemporary American institutions – family, marriage, race, gender roles, wealth, industry, sex – as acidic, corrupted, and hollow. The movie I couldn’t get out of my head after seeing Master Gardener was Sirk’s final and most unbelievable film, Imitation of Life. In it, two poor, struggling single mothers, one white and one black, strike up a friendship that becomes immensely complicated as, over a decade, the white woman becomes a wealthy Broadway star with a painfully innocent teenage daughter, and the black woman acts as their live-in housekeeper while her teenage daughter begins passing for white and runs away from home.

Like Imitation of Life, Master Gardener is a story of many layered, often conflicting messages: respect, kindness, and love are essential, but hard-won; racism is a disease, though curable; wealth is meaningless; wealth saves; class is impenetrable; class is a fiction; our tendency toward division is inevitable; we must allow ourselves to be saved. All these things together get thorny and can easily destabilize the audience. Another balancing act.

I see a straight line from this period of Sirk’s oeuvre – his so-called “women’s pictures” – to Master Gardener. Much of Schrader’s best works, going back to Taxi Driver, have thrived by virtue of their ability to fill real places with uniquely out-of-place protagonists. It comes as a pleasant surprise, then, that he’s turned his eye to a setting as blatantly constructed and unnatural as a garden, and found, as Sirk did, that within the boundaries of imagined space, characters are truly free, and all the more unpredictable.

—June 9, 2023