‘Master Gardener’ movie review: Paul Schrader goes all in for the memes
Throughout his illustrious career, Paul Schrader has always been fascinated by solitary men who are locked in by their own loneliness. From Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver to John LeTour in Light Sleeper, Schrader excels at conjuring up dark portraits of urban isolation, and I’m a sucker for it. While the American director’s meditations on the malaise of modernity are often insightful, his latest film seems like a strange joke.
Titled Master Gardener, Schrader’s new movie stars Joel Edgerton as Narvel, an obsessive horticulturist who seems completely consumed by his job as the head gardener at a wealthy estate which is owned by a rich woman named Norma Haverhill (brilliantly played by Sigourney Weaver). Leading a relatively quiet life which is mostly filled up with details about garden planning, Narvel is made in the image of the other lonely men who populate his cinematic universe.
The premise of the film seems to align perfectly with the trilogy Schrader has been working on, consisting of First Reformed and The Card Counter. With his previous efforts also revolving around men who journal in the silence of their minimalistic rooms, Master Gardener was touted as the perfect conclusion of Schrader’s latest run before it came out. Once audiences saw it, it didn’t take long for audiences to realise that something different was going on.
In recent years, Schrader has garnered the reputation of an online troll as he has continued to make hilariously unhinged posts on Facebook. On the social media platform, he once famously declared: “I enter unwashed into a world that disrespects me and despises my values.” With Master Gardener, he has taken it to the next level by making an entire feature that feels like an expansion of a 4chan meme about redemption and self-actualisation.
The serenity that is presented in the initial scenes of Master Gardener is quietly unsettling, making viewers suspect that there’s something sinister lurking underneath. Almost a modern plantation, the garden functions like an elaborate metaphor which contains many secrets buried under its carefully selected soil. It is soon revealed that Narvel is an ex-neo-Nazi in the witness protection program, employed by Norma, who also has troubling notions about race.
Since it’s a Schrader film, the Master Gardener has some layers to it, especially because of the depth of the central concept. A former white supremacist decides to redeem himself by leading an ascetic life as a gardener, but the garden itself is built on ideas that made him kill and hurt other people. In addition to the problematic history of the estate, Narvel still dedicates his time to modern methods of gardening, which are based on genetic modifications in highly controlled environments to produce the most “desirable” products.
Unlike First Reformed and The Card Counter, which manage to sustain this air of brooding intensity, Master Gardener doesn’t take long to throw it all away. Schrader puts Quintessa Swindell’s biracial character, Maya, at the centre of Narvel’s obsession, designing a hilarious journey where he finds some sort of redemption by making her fall in love with him despite his Nazi tattoos and violent tendencies. The complex structures of race relations in America are transformed into a reductive skit, punctuated by an amusing shot of Narvel going down on Maya in a sadomasochistic trance which I’m sure Schrader considers to be really profound.
Full of ‘We Should All Be Feminists’ T-shirts and facetious reprimands about posting sexist jokes on social media, Master Gardener is more about Schrader purging the trauma of being ridiculed by other people on Facebook than the sincere journey of a man learning to move past his hatred. When someone gives you almost $5million to create an edgy feature-length meme which wouldn’t even be able to win a fan-fiction competition amongst 4chan users, you know you’ve made it in life.
