Master Gardener - Review Thread

Writer/director Paul Schrader has seemingly been going through something of a renaissance and yet he’s managed to undermine a lot of the clout he’s earned by posting a bunch of dumb boomer shit about “cancel culture” on Facebook. That matters because this is a movie about a man who was formerly a member of a racist skinhead group who has seemingly turned his life around and become a gardener at a Southern mansion after having turned on his former gang and gone into witness protection. That’s a potentially thorny subject and Schrader has not necessarily positioned himself as the first person I’d trust to tell such a story but I was willing to give the film a chance and ultimately if the film has any weaknesses I wouldn’t necessarily say they’re rooted in “problematic” handling. I don’t know if Schrader has officially declared this the third part of a trilogy along with First Reformed and The Card Counter but I’m pretty sure it is as all three are films about loners wracked with guilt writing in diaries and potentially contemplating redemption through violence. If you look at them as a trilogy there’s something of an interesting arc in that three men in question have increasingly more to be guilty about with each movie but this doesn’t necessarily mean they’ve found themselves engaging in increasingly violent and self-destructive means to solve their ultimate problems, in fact out of the three films this is probably the one that ends most hopefully.

That having been said I definitely think it’s the weakest of the three as well. It feels less formally daring than First Reformed (easily my favorite of the three) and was also less compelling in its character portrait than The Card Counter. The film has some side characters (including the one played by Sigourney Weaver) that it handles rather awkwardly and I’m also not sure I was able to really get on board with the film’s ending. Beyond that, well, I don’t have any particular problem with Joel Edgerton’s performance here but I don’t find him to be anything close to as strong a screen presence as Ethan Hawke or Oscar Issac both generally and in the specifics of what Schrader was able to bring out of them. I do actually wonder if I would have been kinder to this movie if Schrader had made this before the other two films in this little trilogy of sorts and didn’t have them to compare it to, though I wonder if in that scenario I would have gotten back on board the Schrader train to begin with as this feels a bit more conventional than either of those other movies and may well have fallen into the same VOD oblivion that some of the movies he made before this little renaissance fell into. Actually that’s probably not fair, the movie is good but I would like to see what Schrader can do if he moves past this trilogy and does something new again.
*** out of Five