"Master Gardener" completes what the writer-director Paul Schrader has described as a kind of trilogy, and what I've come to see as a fascinating game of topical bingo.
"First Reformed" (2018) was about a Christian minister radicalized by the threat of climate change; "The Card Counter" (2021) forced a professional gambler to confront his past crimes at Abu Ghraib. These calculated juxtapositions — of a character's main occupation and his deeper, more troubling preoccupations — might sound whimsical or formulaic. But for Schrader, steeped in the conventions of B-thrillers and art films alike, formula can be a jumping-off point rather than a guiding principle. At his best, he treats his political subjects, to say nothing of his human ones, with a moral weight and an emotional gravity rare in American movies.
He tries to do the same in "Master Gardener," which stars Joel Edgerton as an expert horticulturalist concealing his own terrible history of violence. A walking red flag with a green thumb, he goes by the name Narvel Roth, which is surely some sort of punishment. For years Narvel has maintained and lived on the grounds of a handsome Southern estate, the unsubtly named Gracewood Gardens, where he goes about his work with calm authority and a technical expertise that often tilts into the philosophical. The flowers we see early on, blooming and blazing with color in a split-screen, time-lapse opening montage, have been nurtured with dedication, care and a deep trust in nature's due course. Or, as Narvel puts it, "a belief in the future that things will happen according to plan."
