Paul Schrader’s latest film, MASTER GARDENER, opens with a credit sequence of beautiful botanic time lapse accompanied by a gorgeous score by Devonte Hynes. It’s a misdirect as the film is not at all about pretty petals but the inadvertent third piece of the trilogy that comprises First Reformed and The Card Counter.
Joel Edgerton plays Narvel Roth who spends his days meticulously taking care of the horticultural needs of Gracewood estate, a former New Orleans plantation, owned by the wealthy dowager, Mrs Haverhill, played with sovereign superiority by Sigourney Weaver. She’s haughty, horny and ornery, demanding Roth tend her flower beds in the day and her silk-sheeted bed at night.
With his clothes off, indelible ink illustrates his not so illustrious past as a white supremacist. To Miss Haverhill, Narvel is a marvel. Perhaps his tats are part of the attraction for the Southern Belle.
Turns out, he is in witness protection after ratting on his whitey cohorts. Once a noxious weed in society, he has found his roots in gardening, tilling the earth instead of planting seeds of hate.
His reformation is so complete that he takes Mrs Haverhill’s troubled niece, Maya, played by the quintessentially exquisite Quintessa Swindell, as an apprentice and a lover, much to the chagrin of her admonishing aunt.
As Narvel’s affection for Maya increases so does Mrs Haverhill’s loathing for her mixed race niece, a judgement cultivated from jealousy and prejudice, casting them both out of Gracewood, a spectacular fall from grace, an ousting from a virtual Garden of Eden, into a spiralling vortex of violence and retribution.
Paul Schrader’s trademark religious overtones are in place but the relationship between penance and absolution are muddied. With a paradise lost, the picture plunges into pandemonium, drug dealers the devil incarnate.
MASTER GARDENER is more a collision of age, gender and race than the previous films in this trilogy, but it remains nonetheless fascinating, the germination of the plot more successful than the flowering, which stubbornly refuses to blossom.
