MASTER GARDENER - Mark Reviews Movies

Master Gardener, Magnolia Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 18, 2023

A man sits at a desk and writes in a journal. That motif has become a running one for writer/director Paul Schrader, and it continues with Master Gardener, which also continues the theme of a man with a mysterious past, caught up in guilt and regret and anger, and trying to make his way in the world despite all of that. There are too many distinctions and narrative specifics in Schrader's new movie to call it a copy of a copy, but the most important elements of this tale are the ones that make it a wholly questionable exercise in seeking the limits of redemption.

Our journal scribe is Narvel Roth (Joel Edgerton)—if that's his real name. It isn't, by the way, which doesn't come as a surprise after Narvel compares the feeling earned from proper gardening to the buzz of firing a pistol.

Before that, though, he exclusively writes and talks about gardening, a craft he puts into practice at the show garden on the estate of a wealthy woman. Narvel knows the history of botany by memory. He can determine the quality of soil by taking in deep breaths of dirt. At one point, he waxes philosophical (Well, he does that often, but this is a particular case) about how humanity used to walk barefoot and sleep on the ground, allowing for a constant transference of energy between the earth and the body or something along those lines.

If we didn't come to learn that Narvel didn't always go by that name and had quite a different life before arriving at this estate, we'd accept him fully as nothing more or less than the gardening expert who's standing right there. The story, in which Narvel prepares for a charity auction being held by estate owner Norma Haverhill (Sigourney Weaver) and trains the woman's grand-niece Maya (Quintessa Swindell) in the art of gardening, would likely be as ordinary as it sounds.

Here, though, is a big secret. It reveals itself when Narvel removes his shirt at the end of a working day, away from view in the isolation of the small cabin on the grounds he calls home. The man's back and chest are covered in tattoos—twisted swastikas and other Nazi iconography and phrases of white supremacy.

The question here isn't whether or not a man such as Narvel can transform, because Schrader essentially lets us know he has based on a few facts. The man became an informant against the racist far-right militia of which he was a part. He has taken to this new profession and allowed it, not hatred, to encompass his life. Most importantly, perhaps, is that he treats Maya, a child of "mixed blood" (according to her great-aunt, in the first suggestion that Norma might possess more prejudice than our protagonist currently does), with respect.

All of that is on him. The actual question of this story, though, is how a man like Narvel, who has hated and murdered people based on the color of their skin, might be redeemed. That's where Schrader takes a decidedly unfortunate and highly dubious turn.

First, there's some drama, most of which revolves around Maya, whom Norma finds to be increasingly insolent (simply for pointing out how poorly she treated Maya's mother and grandmother) and who is being abused by a local drug dealer. Narvel steps in to help, trying to convince Norma—with whom he has a sexual relationship of convenience for her, by the way, because the woman is merely a source of constant conflict—to be gentler with her grand-niece. He also contacts the law enforcement agent (played by Esai Morales) overseeing his witness protection to have some cops call upon the drug dealer and put some fear into him.

The short of all this setup and these moves toward various conflicts is that the story primarily becomes about the evolving relationship between Narvel and Maya. The problem is how much of Narvel's redemption is placed on Maya, from whom he hides his past until the young woman is more or less indebted to and dependent upon him for assorted reasons.

The entire dynamic is unsettling, which is at least part of the point obviously, but Schrader seems to be working backwards from the end point of this relationship, meaning that the process of arriving there is entirely unconvincing. Take, as the most egregious example, the most significant scene of the duo's relationship, which is set in a dark motel room and has the two characters sounding like robots as they arrive at the terms of what their bond will be. Edgerton already has a bit of that quality to his performance, since the character is just a vessel for back story, but Swindell, who brings such a knowing tenor to Maya, seems hampered by the sudden shift.

Once this is established, the course of the rest of the story becomes a lengthy error in judgment, mainly in imagining a shallow depiction of this relationship is a good idea but also in the inevitable move toward a thriller. Master Gardener is mostly wrongheaded in placing the weight of redemption on the wrong character's shoulders.

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