Paul Schrader Plants a Nazi in a Garden

Before he was the celebrated writer of four Martin Scorsese films and director of classics like American Gigolo, Cat People, and Affliction, Paul Schrader was a young critic and film theorist (like many budding filmmakers). At the age of 24, he wrote a brief, wonderful tome titled Transcendental Style in Film, a meditation on filmmakers whose work embodies, as Schrader writes, “[an] ability to transcend culture and personality […] a spiritual truth that can be achieved by objectively setting objects and pictures side by side that cannot be obtained through a subjective personal or cultural approach to those objects.”

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More than half a century after writing this text, Schrader’s new film Master Gardener completes a trilogy of sorts which could be called a return to transcendental form (in the most literal sense of formalism). The film follows Narvel Roth (Joel Edgerton), a stern but thoughtful man with a hateful past who is tasked with maintaining the grounds of Norma Haverhill, a rich older woman who holds an annual charity gala in her vast gardens. Out of filial obligation, Norma brings in her orphaned niece Maya (Quintessa Swindell) to work in the garden and train under Narvel, which is when personalities clash and secrets are revealed.

Master Gardener’s fantastic first hour stumbles down a slippery slope of a conclusion, through illogical moments, weird tonal shifts, and awkward direction. From Schrader’s work in film theory, it’s fairly clear what he was attempting to do with the decisive moments near the end of Master Gardener, but the truly splendid seeds he plants throughout the film fail to blossom into something ultimately satisfying.

Master Gardener Finishes Schrader’s ‘Man in a Room’ Trilogy

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KOJO / A24

After the incredible religiously themed film First Reformed and the hypnotic but messy follow-up The Card Counter, Schrader’s Master Gardener is yet another movie about a tortured man using repetitive rituals to discipline his mind, and the person he encounters who can guide him to redemption. Each film dissects the ego of a male loner, Schrader’s favorite type of character.

This informal trilogy is heavily reliant upon the “man in a room” method of Schrader’s style, with protagonists providing voiceover narration while they write the same words down in their journals (something he adopted from Robert Bresson). Each film also leads, as if irrevocably doomed, to the threat of deadly violence. That threat worked very well in the previous two films but is arguably the cause for Master Gardener’s ultimate failure to stick the landing.

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The film follows the daily routines of Narvel, a man who, despite overalls and boots caked with dirt, has an immaculate composition. Played with simmering intensity by Edgerton, Narvel rarely has a single hair out of place atop his slicked-back head, and almost never says the wrong word. He’s thoughtful about each motion and utterance, a master in the art of discipline. The root of discipline, however, is ‘disciple,’ so the term always implies discipleship — who, or what, is Narvel a disciple of?

Narvel seems to be a disciple of nature and Norma (a magisterial, acidic, surprisingly funny Sigourney Weaver with her best performance in years), two dominant forces in his life that he’s submitted to. Norma saved him from a dark past, and Narvel is as devoted to her as he is to the plant life he writes so eloquently about. There is a kind of Zen to his life, an idyllic tranquility that belies his own roots — when he disrobes, it’s honestly shocking to see the iconography of Nazis and white supremacists emblazoned across his entire body in inky dark tattoos.

A Classic Paul Schrader Movie, For One Hour

KOJO Studios

Schrader explores his world with grace and subtlety, adhering to the ‘form over content’ principles he adores in transcendental cinema. The stark formalism and minimalist acting, cinematography, and beautiful score from Dev Hynes (also known as Blood Orange) complement Narvel’s disposition in ways that exposition simply can’t, and Schrader knows this better than most filmmakers. A student of Ozu, Dreyer, Bresson, and (to some extent) Tarkovsky, Schrader is fully aware of how to edit out the excess in order to evoke something transcendental; he does what his idol Bresson once wrote, “eliminate anything which might distract from the interior drama.”

Schrader is excellent at this, and even when he brings in exterior drama with the character of Maya, he maintains nearly the same amount of discipline exercised by Narvel in capturing the emotional complications. Norma butts heads with Maya, who is “mixed blood” according to the tough old matriarch, and a drug user who has had a hard life. Maya’s presence disrupts the Zen of these gardens and brings to the surface secrets and issues that had been buried in mounds of repressive dirt.

The way Narvel deals with desire (at least in forms outside his gardening and Norma) is fascinating to watch — this is a character covered in tattoos of Nazi regalia, devoted to a bitter old woman, now falling for a younger person of color. Like the psychic shell in which Narvel lives, he can’t even take off his shirt around someone he shares a mutual attraction with. Edgerton and Swindell do wonders with this narrative disruption, displaying a complicated desire with the requisite restraint of Schrader’s style. If Master Gardener only stayed in this lane, it’d be one of the most interesting films of the year. Unfortunately, it swerves from the lush floral path of its spiritual and psychological portrait, and directly into deserts of dumbness.

Master Gardener Ends in a Slapdash Rush

KOJO Studios

Master Gardener introduces conflict that is important for the character of Narvel, but which is handled poorly and without logic. Incidents develop which force Narvel to confront his past and fight for a chance at redemption, but they’re brought about with genre elements that seem totally foreign to the mesmerizing style that Schrader had developed.

A vigilante-style plot, a white savior narrative, a bizarrely incongruous fantasy sequence, the worst sex scene of the year, and a surprisingly flat and emotionless conclusion trample over the beautiful beginning Schrader had planted. Even Sigourney Weaver’s incredible performance gets walked on at the end, reaching an impasse of absurdity and stupidity. She’s still extremely fun in a wicked way, but her actions at the film’s conclusion make so little sense that it’s embarrassing to watch.

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Maybe Master Gardener was simply rushed — it only began filming in February, and was already being screened at Venice in September. Additionally, Schrader wrote a whole other film with the recently released There Are No Saints, and was likely busy with elements of that. This would explain the odd feeling that things are simply missing throughout the movie.

Of course, it’s an attribute of the transcendental style to be mysterious and not attempt total realism, but even at the basic cinematic level, there seems to be an absence of continuity in the final act, and there’s literally multiple problems with the ADR (Additional Dialogue Replacement), where the dubbing is just completely off. Perhaps Schrader should have ultimately been a bit more like his protagonist, tending to his garden with patience and longevity.

Schrader’s Transcendental Style Stumbles

KOJO Studios

It’s clear that, like his transcendentalist forebears (and his previous two films), Schrader was attempting to develop a hypnotic, mysterious, and repetitive mise en scène that would ultimately be broken by decisive moments, an emotionally and spiritually jolting sequence for the characters and audience alike. Schrader has written about this beautifully in Transcendental Style in Film, formalizing the process as a series of withholding devices that activate attention, followed eventually by decisive action from which emotionality would explode for the first time, with Schrader asking, “What are you going to do with it, now that he has totally conditioned you not to expect it?”

Perversely, it’s the withholding devices that work so well in Master Gardener and the action that doesn’t work at all; the exposition and narrative developments of its ending betrays its careful build-up and stylization. As Schrader wrote 50 years ago in his book:

Transcendental style seeks to maximize the mystery of existence; it eschews all conventional interpretations of reality: realism, naturalism, psychologism, romanticism, expressionism, impressionism […] “If everything is explained by understandable causal necessities,” abbot Amédée Ayfre wrote, “or by objective determinism, even if their precise nature remains unknown, then nothing is sacred.”

The transcendental style of Master Gardener’s entrancing first hour works toward this wonderfully, but fails to pay off in the end. It explains and tries to do too much, and in the process of eschewing “all conventional interpretations of reality,” also eschews common sense and artistry. From KOJO Studios, Master Gardener premiered at the Venice Film Festival, followed by its North American premiere at the New York Film Festival.

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