Nathaniel Carper-Young, Sophomore
The flower offers up some very easy metaphors, as far as narrative framing devices go. There is a certain crudeness to its myriad contexts—your life-in-bloom-isms, your cyclical rejuvenations and decayings, what have you. It all feels a touch too easy by this juncture, when thinking of cinema in the modern age: have all of our earthly images truly been exhausted of new meaning? Must we recycle, reuse, and return to the comforting arms of the oldest artistic tricks in the book? I should hope not.
It would appear that Paul Schrader, in his latest effort, has taken rigorous note of the historical variability of the flower-image and has chosen to capitalize on as many of its contextual opportunities as he could manage. Master Gardener’s fundamental narrative structure seems like a place all too appropriate for such indulgence, with the film centering around a proposedly reformed neo-Nazi wishing to make a new life for himself. The film writes itself—the seeds of hate were sown so long ago. The man in question, Narvel Roth (played by a perfectly quiet Joel Edgerton), is in witness protection and working as a horticulturist for Sigourney Weaver’s tragic-ish woman of politely veiled melancholy. Inevitably, Roth’s past catches up to him, because of course it does, because where else could the director insert his banal provocations otherwise?
Schrader’s cinema lives and dies on the potency of its imagery (which is precisely why Mishima was the best film he ever made, and also why Master Gardener is perhaps the worst), and he clearly knows this. He populates this latest professionalist exercise with scenes of horrid violence and natural beauty—the flashbacks to the protagonist’s “past life” are rife with unsettling brutality, and the scenes in which Roth tends to his garden are competently filmed and very compositionally sound. However, Schrader never properly synthesizes the two—the brutal and the beautiful—making for a film that feels very loudly dissonant, and not in a particularly productive or intriguing way. Contrast is not worth very much when the disparate parts are simply left as such: ornamental, static, and unengaging.
And then, beyond these relatively ineffectual pieces of moviemaking exists the real provocation; the central filmic attraction: the former neo-Nazi is made to take a young biracial woman—Maya—under his wing at the gardens. They meet, and he almost immediately takes a liking to her. In fact, she seems to like him too, sort of. Here, Schrader performs his easiest hat trick yet: there is a romance on the horizon between, would you look at that, a racist of the most extreme degree and a woman of color. It is cheap, and it is distasteful, particularly when considering what it ends up being in service of—Roth seems to desire personal redemption by simply connecting with this new figure in his life; this new image. He shows her his back tattoos, revealing a plethora of Nazi symbols and illustrations, and she reacts in appropriate disgust and shock. before, Maya fades away, textually and emotionally. She is reduced to a stepping-stone idea, completely devoid of dimension; she becomes a corpse-caricature, a non-character, a nobody. To this point, the film is hideously underwritten beyond Roth’s decent characterization; the unromantic romance at hand is given little-to-no dramatic weight, nor is Weaver’s widow of vague mystery, nor is anybody else.
Master Gardener ends, following a series of mini-tragedies and one-noted conflicts, on an image of Roth embracing Maya. It is a sweet moment, I suppose, but it does not quite feel earned or natural; it feels like a forced moment, just as the rest of the film feels forced. It is, like the rest of the film, simply much too easy to be believable.