‘Master Gardener’: Venice Review

Dir/scr: Paul Schrader. US/Australia. 2022. 98 mins.

You can’t always tell a Paul Schrader film on sight – he has made too many erratic or impersonal films in his long career for that to be possible – but when he makes a film that’s as out-and-out Schraderian as Master Gardener, there’s no mistaking his signature. The veteran writer-director is currently on a late-period roll, with First Reformed and The Card Counter, and his follow-up Master Gardener is very much of a piece with them; another story of a solitary man’s redemption through confrontation with thorny moral issues and a troubled past.

Like several other Schrader films, this is a story of a troubled redemption – in this case, one that’s already in process but needs a radical final act to bring it to completion

Not as obviously commercial as sleek gambling story The Card Counter, this film only plays its genre hand when it’s good and ready to, providing some narrative surprises – and grist for controversy – with typical Schrader boldness. But it’s dramatically involving, and features standout performances from a tantalisingly hard-to-read Joel Edgerton, Sigourney Weaver at her loftiest, and Quintessa Swindell, an up-and-coming graduate of TV’s Euphoria, Trinkets and In Treatment. Their presence, and Schrader’s currently enhanced profile, should see prospects bloom.

The setting – for most of the time, at least – is Gracewood Gardens, a beautifully cultivated estate surrounding the plantation-style mansion of wealthy grande dame Norma Haverhill (Weaver) and tended by a gardening team under master horticulturalist Narvel Roth (Edgerton). He’s a taciturn, fastidiously clean-cut man who keeps himself to himself, his hands solemnly tucked in his overalls and his opinions largely to the pages of the daily journal he keeps – opinions that range philosophically on questions of nature, order and design.

He also has a more complex relationship than is at first apparent with his coolly imperious boss, who fondly calls him ‘Sweet Pea’ (there are echoes of the firmly demarcated relationship between the Woody Harrelson character and the society ladies he’s courtier to in Schrader’s The Walker). She has huge affection for him, of one kind or another, but there’s no doubt who’s boss, and – although he enjoys respect as an artisanal expert – Roth’s status in the household may ultimately be little higher than that of Norma’s mutt, curtly named only ‘Porch Dog’. One day, Norma asks Roth a favour, although it’s really a discreetly expressed order: to take on her troubled grandniece Maya (Swindell) as his apprentice.

A young mixed-race woman in her twenties, Maya is left alone by Norma to learn her new craft in her own time – and to bond with Narvel, in a relationship that’s initially quasi-parental but soon begins to test professional boundaries. Meanwhile, much like the Oscar Isaac character in The Card Counter, the rigorously self-enclosed Narvel begins to reveal elements of a darker past that he might not easily be able to escape – and is only known by his police contact Deputy Neruda (Esai Morales). Like several other Schrader films, this is a story of a troubled redemption – in this case, one that’s already in process but needs a radical final act to bring it to completion.

Once Master Gardener fully becomes a thriller, however – involving an expulsion from the Eden of Gracewood into a harsh outside world – we sense Schrader taunting our expectations, and certainly those of a younger audience who may not be ready to accept some of his more  provocative moves. For one thing, Narvel’s background secret is so out-and-out inadmissible that one could easily be as shocked as Maya to discover it – and for some viewers, especially those raised in the social media era, it might be out of the question to accept that a man could ever shake off such a taint. But then, the contradictions of redemption are central to Schrader’s somewhat Dostoevskian and famously Bressonian worldview. Viewers may also balk at the age difference between Narvel and Maya, as their relationship becomes more intimate – and that’s where Schrader, these days notorious for his online trolling of appropriateness, is really defying prevailing codes. 

But for all the film’s provocations, both serious and mischievous, it’s a remarkably elegant, subtle piece, its dynamics tightly reined in – except for one fantasy sequence recalling a similar flourish of vividly-coloured euphoria in The Card Counter, but here registering as a jarring false note. Edgerton gives an extremely fine-tuned performance, while Weaver is coolly imposing and eventually terrifying in her embodiment of ‘grace’; a privilege built upon historic American injustices, as made clear by the sour hints of racist contempt that emerge in her superficial benevolent concern for Maya. As for the horticultural theme, Schrader has clearly done his research into everything from the lifespan of seeds to the American map of gracious gardens, while the floral opening titles couldn’t be more deceptively fragrant.