Master Gardener is the last instalment in a trilogy that began with First Reformed and The Card Counter. All three films mark a return to the brooding male protagonists of Paul Schrader’s earlier career, except that in this case we’re dealing with day workers rather than night workers – a priest in First Reformed, a gardener here and a gambler in The Card Counter, plying his trade amidst the neverending noirish daylight of the casino circuit. All three films also represent a return to Schrader’s classic transcendentalist style and take their cues from Robert Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest in particular, unfolding as highly introspective pieces that are driven by the internal monologue of their protagonists. Master Gardener pairs that with the lushness of Schrader’s masterpiece Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, opening with a credit sequence that plays out against a series of luridly and uncannily digitally composited flowers, a Devonte Hynes score that frequently alludes to Philip Glass, and a hushed, cloistered aesthetic that feels poised at the cusp of  transcendence.

More specifically, Master Gardener is Schrader’s loose adaptation of the parable of the sower. The first half takes place in the garden estate of heiress Norma Haverhill, played by Sigourney Weaver, which is managed by Narvel Roth, played by Joel Edgerton. Narvel, like the protagonists of First Reformed and The Card Counter, is a priestly figure, and treats his garden as his church, discoursing on binomial nomenclature and the distinction between wild, cultivated and agricultural gardens, while insisting that “the formal garden imposes geometric structures on plants” and “gardening is a belief in the future.” After a while, these mantras hollow themselves out and instead become a kind of ventiloquial drone for Schrader’s own transcendent aesthetic, which as always subsumes a violence that isn’t apparent at first glance. For it turns out that Narvel is in witness protection, having turned state’s witness after a career as hitman for a Neo-Nazi fraternity. We only get brief glimpses of this white supremacist past, in the form of expressionist flashbacks whose textures both deform the Haverhill garden and clarify it as an Edenic aspiration, Narvel’s efforts to recover his purity. 

On the face of it this might seem like a fairly standard redemptive narrative – a shift from white supremacy to rewilding in which Narvel strives to restore the plantation from the local industry and excessive fertiliser that has destroyed its fecundity over previous generations. However, that pastoral trajectory is offset by the fact that the Haverhill garden seems to be a converted plantation, much as Norma Haverhill herself feels like a descendant of the antebellum South. The narrative of the film is set in place when Norma asks Narvel to take her great-niece Maya Core, played by Quintessa Swindell, under his wing, after the death of her mother (and Norma’s niece). Although there is certainly a quantum of compassion in this gesture, Norma’s overarching motivation seems to be a kind of proprietory sense of obligation, a feeling that Maya needs to be integrated back into the infrastructure of her plantation. Norma is also unable to fully face Maya’s African-American heritage, referring to her only as “mixed blood” and as the result of her mother’s “unfortunate lifestyle” choices. Norma thus tasks Narvel with a subtle and unspoken mission to save Maya from being black, begging the question of whether she herself knows the exact reason that Narvel entered witness protection in the first place – a fact that remains ambiguous throughout the movie.

In other words, Narvel and Norma have a similar relation to that of a head slave and plantation owner. Together, they visually command the garden and property – Narvel through a thorough attention to its microcosms and minutiae and Norma by way of the scale of the property itself, which is large enough for her to maintain her distance from her staff and panoptic enough to be apprised of their actions at all times. Within that unholy alliance, one of Schrader’s trademark affects emerges – an almost sententious and sanctimonious seriousness paired with an absurd and anarchic perversity. Morality, in Schrader’s universe, nearly always carries this perverse and absurd excess of pleasure, which begins here in the lessons that Narvel provides for Maya on the history and ethics of gardening. Like the film itself, these embed dry canons of knowledge within a more embodied sensuality, as when Narvel explains the significance of loam and then enjoins Maya to hold, smell and kiss it. Moments such as these break the stagebound artifice of the plantation, injecting the film with a more awry strangeness that verges close to self-parody but never entirely commits to it.

The result is a film that doesn’t permit us to quite identify with or reject any one moral code, a film that strikes a queasy balance between asceticism and sensuality, dipping its toes in each worldview just enough to make the other seem perverted. That balance is particularly clear in the case of the Nazi tattoos that are plastered all over Narvel’s back. On the one hand, these make it almost impossible for him to take off his shirt, confining him to a life in which the pleasures and labours of the body must be carefully curtailed. On the other hand, it means that, on the rare occasions that he does take off his shirt, he is forced to disclose his white supremacist past in the most sensuous and embodied manner possible. While there are several sex scenes in the film, the most libidinal moments come when Narvel simply allows Maya to trace out the tattoos on his back, or even simply gaze upon them, a gesture that reduces him to such a state of vulnerability that he has no option but to kneel before her, prompting an elliptical transfiguration that takes place against a backdrop of digitally composited flowers. The same unsettling intimacy is extended to the audience too, once we learn that the only time of day that Narvel takes off his shirt, and allows his Nazi tattoos to breathe, is when he composes the diary entries that comprise the film’s ongoing voiceovers.  

All of these ambivalences, contradictions and hesitations gradually constellate into Schrader’s trademark apocalyptic worldview, one in which we typically find male characters biding their time, waiting out an elongated present tense that becomes more urgent and opaque as it proceeds (“You forget how it started. One day is like the next.”) In this instance, the apocalyptic catalyst comes when Maya is beaten by an ex-boyfriend, propelling Narvel out of the garden and into the third act, when he asks his parole officer Oscar Neruda, played by Esai Morales, to look into the crime. Yet these events only intensify the feeling that we are in a liminal pre-apocalyptic space in which every gesture, utterance and feeling has lost its centre of meaning, in the same way that perception itself is distorted at the event horizon of a black hole. Even as Neruda is promising to assist Narvel, the reference to the Chilean poet in his name resonates in a way that can’t be properly parsed, as does the shirt he is wearing, which states “We should all be feminists” to nobody in particular. Even when Narvel and Maya finally flee the Harwood estate, they have no fixed address or destination, and so are cast into the endlessly deferred temporality of roadside America, subsisting on a string of motels, carparks and diners where Narvel tries to maintain the self he’s crafted in witness protection.  

This apocalyptic holding pattern peaks when Narvel takes Maya back to the housing projects where she grew up. As the looming synths give way to inchoate and distorted vocals, Narvel circles the same block over and over, as the same images – highway overpass, empty field, decaying church – emerge, recede and are absorbed back into the eschatological textures of the film. Most of this sequence is shot in an exaggerated telescopic perspective from the empty back seat of Narvel’s car, recalling the paranoid sightlines of a mass shooter, but also the expressionist flashbacks to Abu Ghraib in The Card Counter and the manic camera movements that accompany Ethan Hawke’s dance at the end of First Reformed. Anarchy, chaos and violence break the calmly appointed surface of Schrader’s aesthetic in each of these films, and yet they are subsumed much more dramatically here, to the point where the resolution seems to be as much a matter of fantasy as Travis Bickle’s reformation at the end of Taxi Driver. While Maya’s drug dealing contacts might trash the Haverhill garden, Narvel and Maya nevertheless return to the manse, where they are reinstated as dual head gardeners, as the eerie calm of the first act returns to cast its spell and glow back over the film. To reach this point, Narvel has to redirect his white supremacist past back into white vigilantism, and Maya has to submit to the logic of the plantation, at least up to a certain point. We are left, then, with an intensification rather than a resolution of the atmosphere of the film, a tacit acknowledge on Schrader’s part that his tortured men are complicit in, perhaps entirely responsible for, the apocalypse that they both fear and yearn for as a matter of course, a condition of their existence: “This was the time – the time I had been waiting for.”