In a vast property in the southern United States, lush gardens attest to jealous care. It is Narvel Roth, a reserved gardener, who maintains them on behalf of Norma Haverhill, the hostess. However, when the latter asks him to train her grand-niece Maya in the horticultural arts, Narvel sees inexorably resurfacing a past that he has done everything to bury. Much was expected of Paul Schrader’s latest proposal. Only, here, to remain in the images of circumstance, Master Gardenerresembles a faded bouquet.
Unveiled in Venice, this film based on a solitary gardener comes to close a trilogy begun with the excellent First Reformed (Dialogue with God), on a solitary priest, and Tea Card Counter, on a solitary player. Informally titled “Man in a Room” (“ Man in a Room ”), this cycle could in fact include the majority of Paul Schrader’s films, the figure of the “lonely man” being recurrent there.
Indeed, of light sleeper To AfflictionPassing by American Gigolo (The American gigolo) And Auto Focus, Paul Schrader’s cinema is populated by protagonists who live withdrawn from the world — physically or, more often, spiritually. Whether due to a sense of alienation, cynicism, misanthropy or a need for atonement, these lonely men are destined to be caught up with the rest of humanity and come out of retirement. An eruption of violence usually ensues.
Upstream, a woman will have had the effect of a disturbing and/or revealing agent. All these characteristic elements were already at work in the remarkable screenplay of Taxi Driverwhich Schrader once wrote for Martin Scorsese.
We find them again in Master Gardener, including the sketch à la Robert Bresson, one of Paul Schrader’s filmmaking masters. With the difference that, this time, said elements fit together badly.
For once, the story lacks fluidity and naturalness. The sometimes frozen phrasing does not help. This is never as striking as during the many very “placed” exchanges where the characters converse seated on a bench (not to mention an embarrassing scene of intimacy, it rings so out of tune). There was a bit of this kind of solemn discrepancy in the dialogues of The Card Counter, but it wasn’t supported that way. Here it is unjustifiably artificial.
Fuzzy talk
Performers do what they can within the limits of this bias. Appreciated especially in Warrior (Warrior), Joel Edgerton is excellent in the title role, modulating his intensity well under deceptive stoicism. Because, like many “Schraderian” antiheroes, Narvel hides a guilty and painful past: he was once a dangerous supremacist.
As for the always formidable Sigourney Weaver, she has no difficulty in rendering the sometimes touching, sometimes repulsive nuances of the imperious Norma, like this hidden racism towards her Métis great-niece.
In this regard, it should be noted that the property so beautifully flowered in the background is clearly an old plantation, with all the infamy that this carries. However, by making Narvel a repentant supremacist in this precise context, we feel that Schrader is trying to formulate a statement on racism from yesterday to today and on the possibility of redemption (through beauty, through art). But that remains vague, Schrader preferring to get lost in the existential considerations that Narvel records – and narrates – in his diary.
In short, if the quality of the three central performances manages to interest for nearly two hours, it is, alas, otherwise the ruminations of the author.