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Read Now: In Master Gardener, Paul Schrader Delves into White Supremacy – 101 Latest News

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The ultimate point of Paul Schrader’s pensive and peculiar new film, Master Gardener, may not be a fabulously coiffed Sigourney Weaver leveling a Luger pistol at a reformed Neo-Nazi in the sitting room of her plantation mansion—but it sure does register potently. Weaver, in a collection of fashionably prim outfits, cuts through this modest film with electric verve. As Norma Haverhill, an heiress to a family estate and its prized flower gardens, Weaver is at her flinty finest; it’s the kind of role she’s had far too little of this century.
She isn’t the main focus of the film, though. While we wonder why Norma’s dear departed daddy had a Third Reich collectible in the first place, the film’s bigger question is that of Narvel Roth (Joel Edgerton). He’s the titular horticulturist, who manages the property’s well-kept grounds.
Narvel is calm, confident, knowledgeable, but there’s a haunt in his eyes. Like the hero of Schrader’s last film, the coolly mesmerizing The Card Counter, Narvel has a bitterly regretted past, one he’s trying to atone for by lovingly and conscientiously tending to a little patch of earth. Schrader shows us what’s plaguing Narvel pretty early on in the film. Undressing in his caretaker’s cottage one evening, Narvel reveals his shirtless torso, covered in white supremacist tattoos.
Narvel was a bad guy once, and Master Gardener depicts the slow work of his becoming a better one. Edgerton, with a sonorous, Sean Penn-esque growl, makes a compelling case for his character’s newfound decency. Narvel carries himself with a practiced, world-weary gentility. He’s caring but firm with Norma, who knows about his past and seems to dangle it in front of him as both threat and perverse foreplay. This is all, we are subtly reminded, taking place on what was likely once a slave plantation. Schrader considers these white people as they stand in the wreckage of their history—their own and their country’s—with a dispassionate, analytical gaze.
The value of such a narrative will likely depend on the beholder. Master Gardener does not issue its own proclamations or moral judgments. The film recognizes the horror and cruelty of Narvel’s past, but it is primarily concerned with imagining what might lie after that ideology has been forsaken. Is there redemption for such a man?
Narvel’s tightly held equilibrium is disturbed by the arrival of Maya (Quintessa Swindell), a grand-niece of Norma’s who has been hired as a gardening apprentice in the hopes that it will rescue her from a troubled existence. Her mother, now dead, was a drug addict, a disease passed on to her daughter. Maya is half-Black, which no doubt complicates Norma’s view of her. That’s never said outright in the film, but it’s certainly a part of the tension that hangs over every interaction between the two women—a sense of unspoken difference, of latent mistrust.
Norma confides to Narvel that she hopes Maya might one day take over the gardens; she wants to keep the family legacy alive after she’s gone. Which implies, to some extent anyway, that Norma is trying to transcend old prejudices, but only conditionally. That is the arresting ambiguity of Schrader’s film, this portrait of people existing in uncertain dialogue with the context they were born into. Narvel and Norma are peers on a spectrum, while Maya seems to represent a way out.
Which isn’t exactly fair to Maya, just as it isn’t for any person of color held up as a token of white people’s enlightenment. Schrader seems aware of that undue burden, even if he perhaps too blithely pushes Narvel and Maya together. Violence eventually enters the picture, as it so often does in Schrader’s films, which brings Master Gardener perilously close to admiring Narvel’s lethal skills. Schrader pulls back, though, before things get too Taken. Betterment is not earned with a gun (or with pruning shears), but with the determined choice to walk away from the cycle—to disavow it in both word and, more importantly, deed.
Much of Master Gardener is disarmingly placid. It’s a warmer, more optimistic film than one might expect, even if it does at times creak with the antiquated perspective of a stalwart septuagenarian filmmaker unwilling to shake off some of the past’s bad habits. Maybe Master Gardener is just some old white guy minimizing racism as malleable character flaw. (In the individual and in the body politic.) But I think Schrader is on a sharper, more salient tack than that. He is investigating one microcosm, one little terrarium, in which the system is being questioned and resolutely challenged. If Narvel’s journey out of the rot can be cultivated to full bloom, then maybe many others elsewhere can be, too. Bit by bit, change may happen in true and tangible ways.
All that said, such an assessment of Master Gardener could risk over-thought. This is a spare and aloof little film, crisply performed and quietly staged. Weaver’s crackling grande dame imperiousness—menacing and strangely pitiable—may be enough to carry the viewer away. But Schrader at least wants prickle in us an awareness of where it is, exactly, we’re being carried to.
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