Venice Review: Paul Schrader’s ‘Master Gardener’

“I made a new life for myself from flowers,” marvels the green-thumbed Narvel Roth. “How unexpected is that?” To be fair, it’s about the only plausible thing that happens in Paul Schrader’s Venice Film Festival out of competition entry Master Gardener, an incredibly silly but fitfully entertaining noir-tinged drama that follows so neatly on from First Reformed and The Card Counter that it’s almost as if Schrader has patented his own sui generis subgenre, a mix of the sublime and the ridiculous that just about works if you’re prepared to walk the line with it.

Like the aforementioned titles, it’s another of Schrader’s “God’s lonely man” films, a concept exemplified in his screenplay for Taxi Driver. Master Gardener, however, has more of the melancholic tone of 1992’s Light Sleeper, and one can easily imagine Willem Dafoe in the lead, playing the dark angel with a disturbing past.

That said, Joel Edgerton is pretty captivating as Roth, the repressed workaholic gardener of the title who works for the icily flirtatious Mrs Haverhill (Sigourney Weaver), owner of Gracewood Gardens. Roth has a near-encyclopedic knowledge of gardening — as well may you by the end of it — but there’s something sinister bubbling away beneath that prim exterior.

It comes to the surface when Mrs Haverhill summons Roth to a meeting on the porch of her mansion. Her mixed-race grandniece Maya is coming to stay, she tells him with a starchy formality in a speech that covers all the bases of the 20-year-old’s life so far, and she would like Roth to take her on as an apprentice. Roth agrees, and up pops Maya (Euphoria’s Quintessa Swindell), who takes to gardening like a duck to water. That is, until her casual drug habit gets her into trouble with her vicious drug-dealer boyfriend R.G. (a deeply disappointing anti-climax when he finally turns up).

Despite the massive age difference — caustically referenced by Mrs Haverhill, who thankfully says out loud what everyone is thinking — Roth develops feelings for Maya, and sets about trying to save her. Sadly, his attempts to do so alienate him from Mrs Haverhill, and the couple is kicked out of Gracewood when a very minor incident suddenly escalates.

The secret that keeps this potboiler boiler is the bizarre fact that Roth is a former neo-Nazi hitman who is in the witness protection scheme after flipping in the witness box to put away the rest of his White Power cronies some 10 years before. Mrs Haverhill seems to know this, and her erotic fascination with Roth suggests she also knows a good bit of rough when she sees it. But when things get serious with Maya, Roth obviously has a lot of explaining to do — in a film that is already dense with explanations.

Despite such a far-fetched plot, there’s a strange gravitas to it all that certainly holds the attention (Atom Egoyan’s thematically similar Remember had a similar, almost high camp appeal). Edgerton’s sour, earnest face does a lot of heavy lifting here, mostly when he thinks back to his days as a hitman (which he does a lot), and when Roth decides to pour all his pent-up energy into taking down R.G. you could be forgiven for expecting a major catharsis, something along the lines of Taxi Driver’s final, shocking shootout. As in Light Sleeper, however, this tension sharply dissipates, but this time not in such an elegant and unexpected way, bowing out with such underwhelming banality that one has to wonder what such a convoluted, digressive plot was all in aid of.

Sad to say that the real story you’d want to see here is the one hinted at in the flashbacks, in the grizzled, bearded faces of angry white supremacists, the situation that took Roth to court on so many cases of homicide, and his disillusion with a cult that led him to disfigure his body with tattoos. Instead, we’re left with an unsatisfyingly weird love story that catches the eye but somehow doesn’t quite make emotional sense, much like Mrs Haverhill’s fantastic but distracting jellyfish wallpaper.

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