2023 Movie
Dir. Paul Schrader · Australia, United Kingdom · English
Yet another tortured-soul-thriller-banger by one of American indie cinema's best
As the third instalment in Paul Schrader’s “man in a room” trilogy after First Reformed (2017) and The Card Counter (2021), Master Gardner rounds up the issues at stake in a most profound way. For anyone who’s seen a film either scripted by Schrader (such as Taxi Driver) or directed by him, there will be no surprises here: lost men, despairing men, men who are desperate to believe in something. But the salvation of love lurks around the corner and the new film makes no exception. An unconventional couple, Joel Edgerton and Quintessa Swindell (as Maya) make up the beating heart of this suspenseful drama with an emotional push and pull delivered in small doses. What could have been a kitschy, insensitive work blossoms into a treatise on how gentle the harshness of life can be.
Narvel Roth is a meticulous horticulturist who is devoted to tending the grounds of a beautiful estate and pandering to his employer, the wealthy dowager Mrs. Haverhill. When she demands that he take on her wayward and troubled niece, it unlocks dark secrets from a buried violent past.
"Despite its starkly lucid surfaces, the film is elusive, quizzical, practically iridescent."
— Richard Brody
"Elements of "The Master Gardener" may in retrospect feel like playing through Schrader's greatest hits but it is lovely to see the director at this point in his career embrace a tiny bit more optimism."
— Leila Latif
Narvel Roth (Joel Edgerton) is an ex White supremacist who now tends to a luxurious garden owned by a rich lady (Sigourney Weaver); all seems well until a young woman comes along and changes everything for him.
French gardens, British gardens, geometric, wild gardens, you name them: they're there from the film's very beginning. It's curios to see how Paul Schrader resists the temptation of turning gardening into an abstracted metaphor for emotional labor by including as many gardens as possible from the get-go. Not only that, but also the theory behind horticulture as narrated by Joel Edgerton's baritone sounds enchanting. With the masterstrokes of editing and tracking shots, the film softens the harsh contrast between its protagonist's violent past and his harmless present existence. Yet, the gardens are there, they need tending; we see them flourish, we see them wither. Nature is part of man and in these depictions one can easily find some eco-activism, even if Schrader, cynical as he is, wouldn't admit it.
Paul Schrader: making gardening great again.
Venice
1 nom
Savina Petkova, PhD, is a Bulgarian film critic and curator based in London whose work has appeared in Sight and Sound, Variety, Little White Lies, Cineuropa, and MUBI Notebook. She is the Programming Lead for Cambridge Film Festival and a senior editor at Talking Shorts, with a focus on contemporary European cinema.
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