For a director who has tried most of the narrative maneuvers in the modern filmmaker’s arsenal (and who has also proposed a few of his own designs that have, over time, established themselves as classical), Paul Schrader has a signature that is as distinctive as can be. More often than not, his stories are woven around lonely protagonists, not infrequently haunted by a lingering ghost of their ambiguous pasts, living in a relative state of stability – and the inevitable moment that their fragile balance breaks down usually coincides with the one in which the protagonists decided to abandon the diaries in which they jot down their darkest and most intimate thoughts, night after night. At the same time, his cinema always contains some form of reference to that of Robert Bresson, an auteur for whom Schrader has cultivated a following since his youth, when he dedicated his fundamental study to transcendental style to him, Ozu and Dreyer. Whether it’s the narrative structure, borrowed from Diary of a Country Priest (1951) and A Man Escaped (1957), or the ending scene of Pickpocket (1959), where love and the promise thereof redeems the soul of an imprisoned protagonist, which the American director has already replicated three times throughout his career, Bresson is inseparable from the fiber of Schrader’s cinema.

In Master Gardener, Schrader concludes a triptych of films built upon this very same formal scaffolding – three films that, broadly speaking, are dealing with the spiritual and existential crises of just as many male protagonists, that are symptomatic of the larger problems that the filmmaker identifies within the fabric of contemporary USA: that of faith (First Reformed, 2017), militarism (The Card Counter, 2021) and, last but not least, that of white supremacist neo-nazism. A three-headed snake, it seems, or rather, maybe just two: its coiled body is formed not as much by the loss of one’s religious beliefs in a world that is seemingly heading to perdition, as much as its moral compass and drive for living that are attached to it, while its biting heads are two iterations of this loss, which materialize in the legitimization of murder, atrocity, and infamy.

Of course, the three men at the heart of these films – a priest, an ex-warden of Abu Ghraib, and a former member of a neo-fascist guerrilla – end up in very different places: their relationship to their pasts and, more importantly, to the future is the decisive factor in their individual destinies. And so, the film’s motto rings like a foreboding ellipsis – “The seeds of love grow like the seeds of hate”  – After all, these two emotions are oft seen as the very emotional peaks that human beings are capable of, however, just like in any binary formula, things get a bit slippery from a certain point onwards.

The keeper of Master Gardner’s diary is Narval Roth (Joel Edgerton), the head horticulturist of a vast estate owned by Norma Haverhill (Sigourney Weaver, channeling the energy of a 1950s high society lady), a wealthy widow who has inherited Gracewood, an estate renowned for its spectacular gardens – while also serving as her occasional lover. It’s clear quite early on that Norma has had a decisive intervention in Narval’s fate, which, in turn, means that he is morally indebted to her: and so, her plea to take care of her orphaned niece, Maya (Quintessa Swindell), will trigger more than just the old lady’s jealousy, but also an inevitable reckoning with his past as a former white supremacist militiaman.

As mentioned, what’s decisive in the ultimate fate of Schrader’s protagonists is their way of relating to the future (the “easier” the past, the more apocalyptic the vision): if Father Ernst Toller’s fate is ultimately uncertain, while WilliamTell fails to escape the consequences of a past that he tried to bury under the guise of a repetitive and hedonistic present. And so Narwhal Roth, with his notion of gardening as being a form of ultimate trust in the future, has the clearest redemption arc of them all. It’s interesting to note that of all three men, Roth is clearly the one that has the most substantial intellectual leanings (just listen to him weave learned metaphors about botany and life, how he analyzes various Latin names), as if to totally counterbalance the profound irrationality of the racist ideology to which he once subscribed. But, sadly, in the end, we don’t get to understand much of his inner architecture: nor what drove him towards racist extremism in his youth (thus, racism as a kind of sui generis condition), now how he rationalizes these morally repugnant choices. Instead, we only get to see just how good this man has become through sheer force of will: see, for example, the scene in which Narval and Maya take a night drive through an impossibly beautiful field of flowers (indeed, for they are digitally augmented) – a scene of such overwhelming naivete (in both narrative and aesthetic terms) that it becomes both touching and ridiculous at the same time.

These complexities are lost in the protagonist’s inevitable ping-pong between the two main female characters: not so much flat caricatures, as other reviewers called them, as much as they are vehicles for outdated narrative patterns, which Schrader has already explored to the point of saturation and self-mannerism (just compare this with the incredible charm of Susan Sarandon’s character in Light Sleeper!). Along with these nuances, there are other opportunities that also go lost in the film’s second half – the metaphorical potential of floriculture, the notion of nature as a healing force, the act of staring deep into the soul of a reformed racist that works hard to suppress his violent urges or even the racial complexities of modern America. Otherwise, why should one take any kind of interest in the figure of a reformed criminal, the idea of white guilt, of redemption? Is it merely a vehicle, a self-complacent political hook? (Not that it would be Schrader’s first – after all, his 1982 take on Cat People, beyond aligning itself with the larger Hollywood trend of remaking old B horror movies at the time, was basically a vehicle to fully exploit Nastassja Kinski’s status as sex symbol; but at least it was deliriously funny, naughty and entertaining.) Edgerton’s austere, self-contained, and often flat style of delivery, while not very far from the Bressonian style, is at odds with the animated performances of his female co-stars, which also doesn’t make matters any better.

It’s not repetition and pastiche that plague Master Gardner – as First Reformed categorically proved it, where, beyond Bresson, Schrader was also directly engaging with Ingmar Bergman (Winter Light, 1963), Carl Th. Dreyer (Ordet, 1955), Maurice Pialat (Sous le soleil de Satan, 1987), and, ultimately, even himself, with Taxi Driver (1976) and Light Sleeper (1992). (Or with Coppola’s The Conversation, in The Card Counter.) Rather, it’s the fact that the seeds of his script never truly come to fruition. No matter how much sunshine and rain they might get, they lack fertility.

Flavia Dima

Film critic & journalist. Collaborates with local and international outlets, programs a short film festival - BIEFF, does occasional moderating gigs and is working on a PhD thesis about home movies. At Films in Frame, she writes the monthly editorial - The State of Cinema and is the magazine's main festival reporter.