Norma (Sigourney Weaver) turns to the chief horticulturist of her lush estate, Narvel Roth (Joel Edgerton), to train her estranged niece, Maya (Quintessa Swindell), so that she will be able to inherit and run Gracewood Gardens, keeping the old plantation house and grounds in the family.  The man agrees, though when secrets of his past come to light, Norma’s plan is threatened, and with a rough history herself, Maya has a lot of work to do before she can run the gardens.   

Paul Schrader rounds out his “Man in a Room” trilogy – a thematic set of films that deal with the reconciliation of modern societal sins – with Master Gardener, a script he writes and directs as he did with First Reformed (2017) and The Card Counter (2021), this time released by Magnolia Pictures after its Venice premiere.  While it is formally a very beautiful film to look at, the 111-minute character study finds the provocateur sharp as ever behind the camera, but his control over the story and characters is beginning to slip.  Schrader takes a strange approach to the film and saddles the lead trio with some impossible characters, but the cast delivers strong performances throughout that help to keep audiences engaged and enraged. 

The film revolves around Edgerton’s Narvel, a man we learn early on has spent a considerable portion of his life as a hitman and now only has a family he is not allowed to contact, and a conscience riddled with guilt.  The real thorn about his character, however, is that he served as a hitman for a white supremacist gang and his chest and back are covered in Nazi symbols and other white power iconography.  To Schrader’s credit, he does not give these dangerous views a platform to speak to audiences who may be similarly minded, but the purpose of the film is still to facilitate compassion towards Narvel and ask audiences if someone who once held this specific brand of hatred in their hearts can ever be forgiven.  The handling of Narvel’s character is a double-edged sword because, as stated, you do not want to platform his previously held ideology, but because the script does not drill down too deeply into his past it is hard to see true growth as a character.   

The second major pitfall of the script is that the growth – for lack of a better word – which we do see is a rather disgusting, predatory story.  As the apprenticeship with Maya, a mixed-race girl, continues, Narvel, while rejecting her initial advances, begins to form a romantic relationship with the young girl.  To take his word for it, he has renounced his extremist views but as the narrative unfolds, it appears simply that he has traded them in for gross abuses of power as this budding relationship begins to blossom. 

Swindell, still very early into her career, delivers a strong performance here but is unable to truly make sense of her character.  To be fair, Maya is a very beguiling character and would pose a challenge to more seasoned actresses as well given the wild oscillations between her emotions and attachment to Narvel. She holds her own against Edgerton and Weaver and is unafraid in front of Alexander Dynan’s lens. The largest problem with the role falls back onto the page as the Schrader really does not give her much to work off of besides being the eventual object of Narvel’s affection; and by some readings, fetishization. It is a film about Narvel’s growth as a person so it is understandable that Maya is written firmly as a supporting character, but she is never given any real opportunities to facilitate Narvel’s change of heart. The film somewhat posits that he is already reformed making the arc of Master Gardener more a test of resolve rather than a lesson in acceptance, but it finds him falling back into his old ways threatening Maya’s drug dealing acquaintance, R.G. (Jared Bankens) at gunpoint late in the film. Narratively unsure and unclear about where along the reformation process Narvel is, Maya is unable to be the tool she is meant to be and it holds back Swindell’s performance from being as affecting as it was intended to be. That being said, in the more straightforward dramatic sequences, she excels and is especially fine in how she navigates the strained relationship with Norma. 

Master Gardener rounds out a trilogy of diminishing returns. The biggest difference – and the fundamental flaw of the film – between its predecessors is that the strife of Narvel is entirely self-imposed. The argument can be made that, in a country where military service is voluntary, the guilt which Ethan Hawke’s Toller or Oscar Isaac’s William feel in their respective films is still a product of their own choices, but the problem with that view is that PTSD and straight up racism are not comparable. We meet Narvel deep into the consequences of his own actions – some time in jail, legally barred from contacting his wife and daughter, starting a new life and a new purpose at Gracewood Gardens – and if he has evolved past his racist beliefs, the audiences simply has to trust him as Schrader hardly tests him. The metaphor of the flower does a lot of the heavy lifting here leaving Edgerton with a muted character arc and a simple performance that gains much of its acclaim on what Narvel was, and not what we see Narvel become. We are denied the most interesting arc of this character, which makes the film feel very stale and the sympathy which is required here is hard to come by given what we know of his past versus the relatively stable present that we do see. Without witnessing Narvel’s crucible, we must take him at his word that he is a changed man and while Egerton gives a performance full of regret, he is hardly someone we feel we can trust at face value. 

Even with its thorns, the film is undeniably the work of a craftsman pursuing a clear vision. Devonté Hynes provides a haunting, synth-accented score that pairs perfectly with Dynan’s camera, and Schrader – some forty-five years into his career – is able to tease out affecting performance from his cast. The roles, messy as they are, are handled well by the professional cast; it is just unfortunate that the script pushes them into the least interesting corners of their story together. It is a frustrating film in all the wrong way that uses the metaphor of the flower to shape a redemption arc for a character that never quite shows us that he has changed in a meaningful way aside from a few brief mentions of regret and mostly it is regret about the consequences, not regret about his actions or his views. This perverse route into the story certainly holds the performances back a bit, but the cast is strong enough to keep audiences engaged and when they begin to fall off due to Schrader’s frustrating storytelling, the technical and crafts side of the film pick up the slack and keep us wholly invested in the larger picture.