“Master Gardener” continues Paul Schrader’s cycle of films in which disturbed men divorced from the world at large record their thoughts, inviting us into their troubled souls. Schrader has called this film the third in his “man in a room” trilogy, which includes “First Reformed” and “The Card Counter,” but he’s been mining variations of this scenario for decades, most famously writing Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver.” Which is to say that Schrader knows the territory of bridging alienation and topicality within the framework of a vigilante thriller. And this trilogy has returned him to the forefront of the consciousness of American cinephilia. Shorter version: Schrader is “in” again.
As with many trilogies, a law of diminishing returns sets in here. “First Reformed” is anguished, agonizing peak Schrader, “The Card Counter” is the same thing in fits and starts, while “Master Gardener” is a fascinating act of brand maintenance that’s equal parts searing confessional, contrived melodrama and inert art object. Schrader wants you to recognize the similarities of all these films with each other and with past films in his career, and he wants you to see that his obsession with certain motifs parallels the obsessive repetitions that define his protagonists’ lives. This parallel is the central Schrader preoccupation, the thing that drives him to return to filmmaking, and it can help acolytes navigate even the cheesiest of waters. The uninitiated, meanwhile, may wonder what the hell they’re watching, asking themselves if “Master Gardener” is a put-on.
Our lead is Narvel Roth (Joel Edgerton), a horticulturist for Gracewood Gardens, a vast estate somewhere in the American South. Like many Schrader heroes before him, he sits at a wooden desk, with a glass of water by his side, writing longhand in a journal. We hear his writing in voiceover, which often concerns the specificities of flowers and humankind’s relationship with land. This is a radical departure for tough-guy Schrader, and he takes to it. There’s something weirdly compelling about listening to a forlorn man speak of flowers in purposefully stilted Schraderese. Edgerton and Schrader each allow you to feel the emotions that Narvel is deliberately suppressing.
Narvel is haunted by titanic demons, and by devoting himself to the particulars of an exacting discipline he hopes to keep them at bay. The filmmaking metaphors arrive easily, but a recent New Yorker profile of Schrader also mentions the garden of his wife, Mary Beth Hurt, as a refuge for her in the wake of Alzheimer’s. I’ve seen “Master Gardener” twice, the first time without that context, and that information intensifies the film’s metaphorical qualities. We feel as if we’re watching a fantasy of a symbolic autobiography dreamed by an aging man attempting to corral life with patterns. Schrader devotes quite a bit of time here to rituals: how lunch is ordered by the gardeners at the estate, how Narvel allows himself exactly one cigarette a day, how Narvel dresses rigidly, pristinely in suits and uniforms that emphasize his impeccable posture. That detail with the cigarette lingers with me. It suggests a man once at the mercy of his vices, or of chaos, finding a way to have his cake and eat it. Enjoy something, with control. Edgerton, in a wonderful performance, lends this control dignity.
If a master gardening hero sounds like a radical departure for a filmmaker associated with erudite, self-conscious crime movies, it’s a shame that Schrader doesn’t double down. He introduces a compelling triangle—between Narvel and his employer, Norma Haverhill (Sigourney Weaver), with whom he’s sleeping, and her grand-niece, Maya (Quintessa Swindell), a recovering addict who suggests the chaos Narvel has escaped—and shoehorns it into a routine genre framework. Schrader’s theatrically bare dialogue and austere framing work as projections of Narvel’s particular point of view, but they aren’t adequate for establishing other characters’ personalities. Everyone here talks in Narvel’s stifled patois, and it grows numbing and unconvincing. Think of “Taxi Driver.” We were stuck mostly in a very disturbed man’s head, but we were privy to other textures. We saw what he couldn’t see. That’s not the case with current Schrader films, which fetishize control over every element as, yes, a description of a pared-down philosophy of living, but as also a lo-fi fashion statement, a kind of motion art magazine for the terminally depressed.
“Master Gardener” is compelling when its sense of evil is subliminal. We’re told early on that Narvel was once a white supremacist. His body is covered in racist tattoos, which is why every inch of him is fastidiously covered up at all times, apart from his erotic encounters with Norma, who knows of his past. Maya is biracial, and that fact, plus Narvel’s white supremacy, plus the inescapable likelihood that Gracewood Gardens was once a plantation, get your head spinning with anticipation of what Schrader is up to. Watching the film suggests a trap being set in slow motion, and Schrader works up a lather of poignant dread. In fact, the mood, the patterning, and the steadfastly direct and unfussy framing are almost enough to ignore the absurdity of the set-up. Almost.
Schrader springs one wild scene, burnishing his credentials as a horny old white guy trying to ensure that art remains provocative in an age in which people want their political convictions parroted to them endlessly. Narvel and Maya eventually become lovers, and he strips for her, revealing his shame, his evil, his fear, the core of his self-loathing, and crawls toward nude Maya with the intention of going down on her. This blend of servitude and self-glorification, of politics and national trauma with masturbatory fantasies, is so outrageous that you wonder how Norman Mailer or Philip Roth didn’t get there first.
For Roth, such a scene would’ve had a point. Think of how hidden racial identity is used to indict mealy-mouthed, borderline fascist political correctness in “The Human Stain.” For Schrader, though, such a scene is a passing hand grenade tossed into a plot that grows derivative. By the time Narvel is threatening gangsters with pruners, we’ve reached a realm of self-parody, perhaps intentionally. If you’re wondering how we’ve gone from a story of a lone man atoning for his sins to a tortured, racially freighted sex fantasy to “Taken” on a budget, well, that’s the manna of cray-cray that Schrader mines in “Master Gardener.” For all its flaws, the film’s weirdness has an admirable integrity.
Say what you will about Schrader and “Master Gardener,” but at least he’s willing to interrogate the implications of his fantasies of redemption via young, beautiful women of color. By contrast, Ben Affleck is not willing to interrogate his fantasies of redemption via powerful men of color. “Air” is a celebration of white dudes finding a way to make unimaginable amounts of money by producing shoes in slave shops that are tied to a Black man who will become an icon. That is the story of Nike and Michael Jordan and Air Jordan as Affleck tells it, but he’s skittish about the details. International slave shops aren’t mentioned, and Jordan managing to negotiate a cut of each pair of Air Jordans sold is celebrated as an implicit racial victory, which it is, partially.
I’m trying not to get too self-righteous about “Air.” Most Hollywood movies are hypocritical about issues of sex, class, race, and especially money. Underneath the sentimental filler, what was “Jerry Maguire” but a story of a white dude finding a way to make a nickel off of a risky Black athlete, which it absurdly celebrated as human growth? In movies, money is often simultaneously criticized as superficial, which is easy for rich movie makers to say, and utilized as symbolism for a hero getting his head straight.
“Air” sticks out more than usual for involving real people. It’s difficult to imagine Nike maestro Phil Knight (played here by Affleck) as a decent-ish goofball in jumpsuits with a good heart. He may be, I don’t know, but I’m guessing, based on his monumental success in a vicious field, that he’s a shark. I’m guessing that Jordan, who is kept mostly off screen in “Air” and treated as a Christ figure waiting to inspire millions of Black children, is also a shark. At the very least, they are both very comfortable with the least savory facets of consumerism. Of course, Jordan did inspire millions of children and he is a brilliant athlete and it is impossible to overstate the importance of his iconography. But life isn’t simple—he still could be a shark. The fact that Jordan cowed Affleck into treating him as a god here only bolsters my suspicion.
The movie’s good reviews aren’t mystifying. It’s fun and snappy, with a lot of smart actors—Matt Damon, Viola Davis, Chris Tucker, Chris Messina, and Marlon Wayans, among them—saying smart things. As he has shown in other movies behind the camera, Affleck is generous and capable with actors. He’s a genre movie guy at heart. His breakout as an actor with Damon, “Good Will Hunting,” was about boys being boys, and they’ve grown into middle-aged men of industry who essentially sell stories of bros being bros. Critics are nostalgic for star-driven dude movies, and this movie’s white exceptionalism can go down a little easier than usual in this self-conscious age because it’s laundered by Jordan’s reputation. Again, I get it: I like money, too. I like buying things. I like dude movies. But let’s be real about what we’re enjoying: “Air” is a corporate advertisement. If Affleck had treated this story as satire, he could’ve had a caustically funny Billy Wilder movie that still conditioned you to root for the corporate white guys. But Affleck takes the audience-pandering course and ends up stranded in a sea of “I Love the ‘80s” kitsch.
“Master Gardener” is now playing at the Movieland Bowtie theater. “Air” is now streaming on Amazon.
