Paul Schrader is again with one other variation on his signature theme, though now it looks like a fifth-generation Xerox. Right here once more is the lonely, pushed male – derived from the philosopher-hero of Bresson’s Pickpocket – broodingly writing his journal of a night in situations of monkish austerity, haunted by the existential revelations of crime and a violent previous, attempting to rework or subsume his trauma into some new vocational obsession.
Grasp Gardener has been described because the third movie in a trilogy with First Reformed (2017) and The Card Counter (2021), though the resemblances go additional again into his cv than that and Schrader might be distinctive in that he’s not merely an auteur however a style unto himself. This new iteration is eccentric – an oddity, actually, with its stately, formal dialogue set-pieces which really feel considerably like a contemporary translation or an adaptation of some older traditional textual content. If Manoel de Oliveira have been to direct a criminal offense thriller, it would appear like this.
The scene is a sublime nation home with a again porch and exquisite in depth gardens – evidently a former plantation (with all of the unstated racial tensions that go together with it) – dominated over by an imperious grande dame, performed by Sigourney Weaver, referred to as Mrs Norma Haverhill. (Did Schrader intend an echo of Miss Havisham?) Norma’s chief gardener is Narvel Roth (Joel Edgerton), a passionate and knowledgable horticulturist with a extreme quick haircut and facet parting, like Ethan Hawke in First Reformed. He additionally has a kinkily shut mistress-servant relationship with Norma.
Issues between them get tense when Norma asks Narvel to tackle her younger grand-niece, Maya (Quintessa Swindell), as an apprentice: we choose up on Norma’s suppressed bigoted distaste for her mixed-race background. However Maya does effectively within the job and when she begins getting threatened by a drug gang in her powerful neighbourhood, Narvel’s personal secret previous in violent crime rises to the floor as he units out to guard her.
Grasp Gardener in the end defeated me: its characterisations and central relationships are stilted and unrelaxed, and the narrative transitions really feel arbitrary and unmotivated. Oddly, that is most partaking when it’s merely about flowers and crops on the very starting, and the Buñuelian twist about Norma and Narvel’s non-public understanding simply makes it extra intriguing. However we’re entitled to ask: when did Narvel meet Norma? How did he conceive his ardour for gardening? Passable solutions to those questions aren’t forthcoming.
Then there’s the inevitable pivot to violence – weird, actually, and in addition preposterous. Is there a psychic hyperlink between gardening and violent crime? (I don’t actually suppose so, however I discovered myself pondering of the “gardening accident” that killed a drummer of Spinal Faucet. Was it an accident?) And so the story begins its time-honoured slide in the direction of macho retributive brutality. What subsequent? A jockey who obsessively writes his journal alone in his room? A sommelier who obsessively writes his journal alone in his room? A toad-sexer who obsessively writes his journal alone in his room? Maybe Schrader will certainly defiantly return to his accustomed theme for his subsequent movie – and this good, stressed director may effectively make it work. Sadly, this one doesn’t.
