The third in Schrader’s recent pseudo trilogy (along with First Reformed and The Card Counter), Master Gardener is the least strange, for better and for weaker. It’s a strong film, but also a mild one. Romantic but shy about branching away from Schrader’s longstanding concerns. It has teeth but doesn’t know what to do with them. It works, but its impact will depend on how much more space one has for these favorite preoccupation of Schrader’s.
After a career beginning as Martin Scorsese’s scribe of choice, most notably Taxi Driver and Raging Bull — searing meditations on Catholic guilt that tower in the New Hollywood canon — Schrader struck out on his own. While he eventually re-teamed with Scorsese for 1999’s absolutely gonzo, vibrant Bringing Our The Dead, he otherwise carved a career of his own. Defined mostly by Hard Core and American Gigolo, Schrader’s early auteur years fill a striking but somewhat inert space in the lore of 80’s — 2000's American film. He is never mentioned alongside your Friedkins, your Lumets, or even your Roegs or Pakulas. And if he is; it’s as per his partnership with Scorsese.
His recent decades have yielded truly odd artifacts like Adam Resurrected; the kind of work arguably possessed by genius, more or less motivated by nothing but pure artistry, and yet not satisfying watches. Others, like American Gigolo and The Walker are vivid, noirish, simple moral adult dramas; the kind the internet are fond of missing these days, and not without cause. Along with generational fellows Werner Herzog and Wim Wenders, he is a rare filmmaker driven to (and able to fund) projects where he is strictly and only making the story he wants to make. When they don’t work, they’re still mis-shapen in an interesting way. When they fail, they’re still in dialogue with topics more worthwhile than your average major release.
Iconoclasty has its limits. Is there another world in which Amy Heckerling, Norman Jewison, Peter Yates, are as exciting figures, even if their films don’t mirror their own personal torment? One may thrill to Hunter Thompson and Valerie Solanis at a certain age, but find more richness in Iris Murdoch or the films of Frederick Wiseman a little further down the road. There are cases to be made for both. Schrader himself has long straddled each — prematurely mature, but also fairly steady in his Difficult Men Dissatisfied With God narratives. Sometimes, a lane is a lane for a reason. Other times, dimishing returns can begin to stain even the shine of the early work.
As far as New Hollyood goes, who our people are can say a lot. Is Altman your flavor or naturalism or Cassavetes? Ashby or Varda?
Following Bonnie and Clyde and Who’s That Knocking at My Door in 1967, and the establishment of the modern film rating system, there was space for all manner of new material at the local cinema. Best Picture in 1968 was the G-rated Oliver!. Within a mere five years, oscar voters were choosing between A Clockwork Orange and The French Connection, The Exorcist, and MASH among others. Japanese, French, Swedish, and Italian films were accessible to most folks in or near a major city. Your Bogdonaviches, Altmans, and others overlapped dialogue, breaking the formal rules of filmmaking, showing people interrupting, operating in groups, smoking, chatting, lazing. Easy Rider showed a side of America as real as any other, the same era that Cleopatra, Around The World in 80 Days, and Gigi were the last gasps of Hollywood as a structured, mannered machine for producing lush, more or less palatable, morally crisp, crisply moral, simplified and encouraging portraits of life.
And then, 1967, and beyond.
In the new century, Schrader has veered into even weirder, more personal, bizarre, and hard-to-stomach territory (his Dog Eat Dog starrring Nic Cage and Willem Dafoe is some kind of absurd masterpiece, and also patently offensive, not to mention made as if the filmmaker had never seen how movies are supposed to operate). This is partly why, in 2018, the reception to First Reformed, the first in the trilogy which Master Gardener concludes, was so strong. Narrowly missing a nomination for Ethan Hawke, the film snuck in with an original screenplay Oscar nod and featured on most prominent lists of the year’s best films. With reason. It’s pensive, pained, but still goes down easy. For all of Schrader’s unshowy directional style: it is a distinct, handsome, film that appears to take place in a world we recognize — not naturalistic, per se, but flat and plain in a productive way. Hawke is fully commited, the story (a priest reckons with his faith and doubt as he considers the environment in the wake of a passionately political parishoner’s suicide) is powerful and mature, jarringly unlike even standard art-house fare. It’s Schrader back to what was labeled ‘God’s Lonely Man’ in his Taxi Driver days.
From there he made The Card Counter with Oscar Isaac, and, now, Master Gardener.
Edgerton may be the best suited lead to Schrader’s “God’s Lonely Man” obsession — he remains an actor that I find credibly feels like a tender man capable of violence (or, if you like, a violent man capable of tenderness). Here, he is allowed to operate in both modes, but the greatest violence depicted (or at least the most interesting) is in his negotiation of the power balance between him and Sigourney Weaver’s Mrs. Haverhill.
Weaver, by the way, reminds us that she’s one of the most naturally commanding screen presences in Hollywood. Newcomer Quintessa Swindell is a suitable cypher imbued with just enough inner life to make their scenes with Edgerton meaningful. Schrader has never much known how to write women, but then again he’s never known how to write more than one kind of man. In his jaw-dropping masterwork, “Mishima: a Life in Four Chapters”, he gives his great discertation on masculinity and femininity in the same character, one who reality provided — a queer playwright, a fascist nationalist, an obsessive over beauty, the body, and who saw not taking physical action towards ones philosophical beliefs as the most damnable sin against God. That film is Schrader’s grandest argument for why cinema is the proper format for grappling with the great moral questions of human nature.
Master Gardener, while a good film, is no Mishima. Its quietness — unlike in First Reformed — is something of a drawback. It’s steadiness feels a touch empty. Its nods to violence are downright boring, making their appearance jarring and unsexy. And yet it is as romantic as Schrader, which is to say that it sees love, sex, and most of all vulnerability as an act of prayer and a pathway to contrition. From Taxi Driver through Master Gardener, we see lonliness as a symptom of violence, and not the opposite (a mistake made by the countless imitators, Joker being the dumbest and most nastily juvenile).
And in that sense, it stands to reason that Schrader, still telling stories about how Vietnam broke our boys, isn’t that interested in saying anything particularly new or poetic about the trauma in this current protagonist’s heart (violent racism). It’s really a variation on a theme: the power our lonely man once derived from being a Good Soldier to Bad Gods, the way in which he now offers priestly devotion to something tangible and rational (horticulture), until a young figure draws him away from chastity both in terms of aggression and sex. For how much Schrader sees intimacy, art, death, prayer, and introspection as facets of the same unknowable language, he has always been most tender and the least explicit when it comes to lovemaking. Here this continues, with him — associated forever with external and internal violence in his scripts — holding back notably and foregrounding the statement of what we see rather than how much we see during a moment of passion. There again, unlike his imitators, he makes clear that the chiaroscuro: the transportive nature of quiet shadowy need and the way that desire for a person and the great dream that they might both control and heal you is Schrader’s primary concern.
The sum here is greater than its parts: I found that I could take as many meditations on plants, no matter how naked their metaphors, as Schrader via Edgerton want to give me. Likewise Narvel and Maya’s slow-growing friendship and mutual protection strikes the tone it promises and doesn’t overstay its welcome. This is a slender film and therein shortchanges the chance to make an actual statement about the Things it is portending to be About. It didn’t bother me much, and the final moments satisfy. Schrader can compose this particular melody in his sleep. That’s not a bad thing, and Edgerton and Swindell hum as the newest Hansel and Gretel in Schrader’s ongoing fairytales. They’re sexy, composed, and penitent. Someone has sinned. Someone must reckon with it. Directing further sin against those who deserve it is one of cinema’s favourite answers to the question of human nature’s depravity. And yet Schrader, still, for all of the Equalizers and Gran Torinos and Dheepans out there, seems to be the only one telling these stories as desperate pleas for grace, order, and cleanness.
Here he finds himself, I’ll offer: in Sean Baker mode — oddly enough. What the gardens here know that the small, fraught, prayerful people don’t is how to simply be the thing they were created to be, just as Baker (in his far superior The Florida Project) found a poetic, deeply humorous image in coastline cranes peskily roaming the parking circle at Bobby’s (frequent Schrader collaborator Willem Dafoe) hotel while he is just trying to run his life and livelihood even as his residents scamper, scheme, and swindle.
Nature, the nearby resorts and theme park (man’s most opulent prayer for eternity: the building of great towers), the clutter of people who are more or less spiritual opposites of Schrader Men (gleefully, natively non-introspective), and at the end of the day: cranes clacking along where they shouldn’t be. And why shouldn’t they? Because we have to have parking at hotels.
If we didn’t — what would anything mean, anyhow?
