111 min | R | May 19, 2023 | Magnolia Pictures
A man with a hidden past tends the gardens of a wealthy estate and lives by ritual and routine. His employer asks him to take on her troubled grandniece as an apprentice. The soil is the only thing in this film that stays clean.
Narvel Roth runs the grounds of Gracewood Gardens with monastic discipline. He keeps a journal, he speaks of horticulture as a kind of faith, and he answers to the estate’s aging matriarch, Norma Haverhill. His ordered life cracks when Norma orders him to mentor Maya, her grandniece, a young woman with addiction in her recent past. The film is the latest in Paul Schrader’s series about solitary men who write in journals and carry sins they cannot bury. Master Gardener asks whether a person can cultivate a new self the way he cultivates a flower bed, and it refuses to make the answer comfortable.
Joel Edgerton plays Narvel with a stillness that reads as both peace and suppression. He keeps his voice low and his body controlled, and the control is the performance. When Edgerton finally lets Narvel’s history surface, the rage and shame underneath the gardener’s calm have weight because he held them so tightly for so long. Sigourney Weaver plays Norma Haverhill as a woman who confuses ownership with affection. She treats Narvel as both employee and possession, and Weaver makes the cruelty elegant and the entitlement casual. Quintessa Swindell plays Maya with a wariness that never tips into a victim’s passivity.
Schrader writes and directs with the austerity that has defined his recent work. He shoots the gardens in symmetrical, almost clinical compositions that turn beauty into a form of order and surveillance. The score by Devonté Hynes runs cool and minimal under the images, and the restraint keeps the melodrama at arm’s length. Schrader stages Narvel’s confessional voiceover against the labor of planting and pruning, and the contrast frames the man’s penance as something he performs with his hands. One dreamlike sequence of flowering roads breaks the rigid geometry and exposes the longing the gardener will not say aloud.
The film works best as a study of a man who believes discipline can launder a soul. Narvel’s transformation is real and incomplete, and Schrader knows the difference. The plot machinery in the back half feels thinner than the ideas driving it, and the resolution arrives too neatly for a filmmaker who usually resists comfort. What lingers is the central question. A garden can be replanted. A person is harder.