REVIEW: Master Gardener [2023]

Rating: R | Runtime: 111 minutes
Release Date: May 19th, 2023 (USA)
Studio: Magnolia Pictures
Director(s): Paul Schrader
Writer(s): Paul Schrader

You can’t spreadsheet nature. It’ll only surprise you.

The press notes for Paul Schrader’s Master Gardener make it seem as though his process of writing the script was akin to Mad Libs. It talks about how everything started with the idea of gardening—a juicy metaphor he could wield in different ways later. And deciding to stick to his “man in a room” concept, said gardener would have to be a loner. A recluse. Why? Enter the idea of witness protection.

Okay. Interesting. He’s living quietly in hiding, an informer trying to stay alive and perhaps redeem himself from the deeds of his past. Why? What horrible things did he do? The lightbulb snaps above Schrader’s head: white supremacist gun-for-hire. Of course! Why wouldn’t one’s mind gravitate there? No one ever accused Schrader of being non-confrontational or non-controversial.

It is a captivating premise. That’s not the problem—despite my obvious sarcasm. The problem lies in where he takes it. Because this isn’t actually a redemption story. We don’t care about Narvel Roth (Joel Edgerton) enough to let it be one. This is a story solely about race and how Schrader can use it to manipulate his characters into acting in the most outrageous ways possible under the guise of believing liberalism and political correctness is solely about blind forgiveness.

He makes it so the estate where Narvel has reinvented himself as a gardener is a colonial plantation stewarded by a racist dowager (Sigourney Weaver’s Norma Haverhill) whose kink is gazing upon his swastika tattoos. And he introduces a much younger woman to drive a wedge into their idyllic if warped existence by way of Norma’s “mixed blood” great niece Maya (Quintessa Swindell).

You couldn’t render Master Gardener riper for ill-conceived social commentary if you tried with the addition of drugs, abuse, and romance in ways Schrader intentionally wields to augment our “unease”. None of it made me feel anything other than tickled by just how silly it all played out, though. I honestly thought everything would rewind to show the final half of the film was a delusional fantasy of a bad man who thinks he can be saved only to discover the harsh reality that actions have consequences.

And if you’ve seen the filmmaker’s last two works (First Reformed and The Card Counter), that assumption would be the odds-on favorite to come to fruition. The most controversial aspect of the whole is thus Schrader’s left-field decision to reject impulse and do the opposite: providing a finish that’s even sillier than the journey taken to experience it.

Because he doesn’t even try to approach the psychology of what he’s created. It’s literally all for kicks. The overwrought voiceover. The two-second wrestling matches over morality that end with “but I really want to take my clothes off” energy. There’s a missed opportunity here to have played it all intentionally as a comedy because it surely doesn’t work as a drama. Two dimensional pawns in an artist’s superficially drawn exercise of racial taboo can’t possess gravitas.

So, do yourself a favor and lean into the cartoonish one-eighties and textbook “civility” of empowered bigots exploiting everyone and everything for their personal pleasure. Laugh at it all as a farcical satire of Schrader’s last two films even if the marketing push says it’s been made in earnest. Otherwise, you’ll be wondering what it was you just watched like me. Who knows? Maybe it’s all First Reformed and The Card Counter‘s fault for being too good.