TMS Movie Review: Master Gardener
(Magnolia Pictures)
Paul Schrader’s Master Gardener does for gardening what his The Card Counter (2021) did for gambling. When he isn’t making borderline cliché boomer posts on his Facebook, Schrader is still one of the most active auteurs working in cinema. While his opinions might currently lean toward ‘cringe’ in real life, his films—even when they don’t fully hit—are still more interesting than a lot of studio mediocrity being released. Both The Card Counter and now Master Gardener take the same themes, almost note for note. Instead of Oscar Isaac, we have Joel Edgerton as the latest of Schrader’s disturbed lonely men in seedy environments.
Set in an ambiguous New Orleans-esque town, Narvel (Edgerton) is the head of the elaborate botanical garden Gracewood owned by affluent Norma Havenhill (Sigourney Weaver), who is both his superior and lover. When Norma informs Navel that he must hire her orphaned great niece Maya (Quintessa Swindell) as an apprentice for the garden; he’s skeptical, but quickly sees her potential and strengths. Soon, drama, secrets, danger and even romance ensue for the three.
(Magnolia Pictures)
In The Card Counter, Isaac and Tye Sheridan went from mentor-protégé to surrogate father-son by the end. Here, Schrader starts out with the same kind of pairing, but opts for a love story/triangle this time. While I enjoyed The Card Counter, I found Master Gardener to be a bit derivative and underwhelming execution wise. The first half has a nice blend of philosophical allegories opposite some pretty garden footage, of course featuring one of Schrader’s favorite tropes: ‘mentally detached man writing in a journal.’ But once we leave the garden for a semi-road flick/crime drama as the second half, we tread the usual waters from the writer-director’s past work; reminding us of not only The Card Counter, but Schrader’s screenplay for Martin Scorsese’s classic Taxi Driver (1976). Though I can appreciate the filmmaker for wanting to include feminine themes, I’ve never completely bought him as a romantic. In Master Gardener, the love plot ultimately ends up feeling saccharine and cheesy compared to somber and bittersweet in The Card Counter and First Reformed (2017) or doomed in Taxi Driver and Scorsese’s Raging Bull (1980).
I will admit, seeing a veteran police officer in a T-shirt with the text ‘we should all be feminists’ during a scene got a legitimate snort out of me. But sorry to say, the fresh teaser/trailer for Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon out later this year got me more excited than the entirety of Master Gardener.