Master Gardener

Master Gardener

Venice Film Festival

VERDICT: A timely occasion to foreground the growing role of American extremists like the Proud Boys is largely manqué in Paul Schrader’s unconvincing story about a marked man trying to redeem himself, starring Joel Edgerton and Sigourney Weaver.

While on the Venice Lido to receive the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement, master screenwriter and film director Paul Schrader also premiered his new film Master Gardener out of competition. Set on what looks like a Southern plantation that has been converted into a prize-winning garden estate by the aging lady of the manor Mrs. Haverhill (played by a classy but shrewish Sigourney Weaver) and lovingly tended by a professional gardening staff headed by the enigmatic Narvel Roth (Australian actor Joel Edgerton), it is the perfect set-up for a succulent Southern drama — but one that soon, alas, reveals itself to be a handful of dry dust.

The hero of the tale is the tough gardener, a man who knows everything about plants and explains their history in voiceover, but whose haunted eyes and evasive remarks about his origins makes it clear that he has a backstory to tell. This is soon revealed in spotty flashbacks that show him firing guns with a paramilitary group and executing the assassination orders of a vicious white-haired leader. His entire torso is covered in swastikas and death head tattoos, and his identity as an ex-Proud Boy is at once evident to a punk drug pusher on the street, but the viewer is enlightened only by and by.

There are parallels to be drawn with Schrader’s previous film, The Card Counter (in Venice competition last year), in which Oscar Isaac’s hidden past as a former U.S. soldier involved in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq comes back to haunt him. But whereas the earlier film is a profound reflection on an American tragedy, here the crucial connection is missing between the protagonist and the violence and hatred of armed groups loose in the country.

A love story that shyly blossoms between Narvel and Mrs. Haverhill’s grand-niece Maya (Quintessa Swindell from Netflix’s Trinkets) seems highly unlikely, and not just because Maya is dark-skinned and 25 years Narvel’s junior (“playing Humbert Humbert to her Lolita” as Mrs. Haverhill sneers in a funny-because-improbable line of dialogue, of which the film is over-stocked.) There is simply no chemistry between the two. It is less of a stretch to believe that the macho man gardener is at the service of Mrs. Haverhill, 25 years his senior, and that he seems to enjoy her dominant role in calling the shots when she orders him to take her to bed. Sigourney Weaver is one of the few celebrity actresses who could pull off this weird role, especially acting through a haze of stagy, non-naturalistic dialogue.

Edgerton is lucky to play a man of few words; he can also draw on a wide range of acting experience from Shakespeare to TV, as well as directing the well-liked Boy Erased in 2018. He stoically holds the show together when it turns into a mini-road movie, though it is strange there are no villains pursuing him and Maya after much forewarning by his conscientious police case officer (played by an affable Esai Morales who, in case you don’t get it, wears a T-shirt that reads “We should all be feminists.”) In reality, Narvel is in so little danger that he is able to dispatch a houseful of hoodlums without firing a shot. Even the ending is uncharacteristically upbeat for a Paul Schrader film.

The garden setting has a dry, off-season look emphasized in Alexander Dynan’s cinematography, and the only lushness appears in a dream sequence of Narvel and Maya driving along a highway lined with wild flowers, perhaps a hint that the joys and euphoria of life are fleeting.

Director, screenplay: Paul Schrader
Cast: Joel Edgerton, Sigourney Weaver, Quintessa Swindell, Esai Morales
Producers: David Gonzales, Amanda Crittenden, Dale Roberts, Scott LaStaiti, Luisa Law, Jamieson McClurg
Cinematography: Alexander Dynan

Editing: Benjamin Rodriguez, Jr.
Production design: Ashley Fenton
Costume design: Wendy Talley
Music: Devonte Hynes
Sound: Dustin Fleetwood
Production companies: Northern Lights, KOJO Studios, Ottocento Films, Flickstar
World Sales: HanWay Films
Venue: Venice Film Festival (Out of competition fiction)
In English
107 minutes