‘Master Gardener’ review: A story of hate, redemption and horticulture, from the creator of ‘Taxi Driver’

It springs from many inspirations, notably Robert Bresson’s “Pickpocket,” but writer-director Paul Schrader has made the components his own and then some: an isolated man, alone in a room, writes in his diary while ruminating about the forces of darkness outside that room and inside his soul.

Travis Bickle in “Taxi Driver,” written by Schrader, connects directly to Schrader’s most recent trio of pictures begun with the excellent “First Reformed” with Ethan Hawke; the Oscar Isaac-headed drama “The Card Counter”; and now, starring Joel Edgerton, “Master Gardener.” Old-fashioned in its pacing, but not really part of any fashion, new or old, other than Schrader’s, it’s a steely, flawed but fascinating affront to most anything else playing theaters right now.

Somewhere near New Orleans, the serene Gracewood Gardens estate flourishes under the supervision of Narvel Roth. In his journal, read in voiceover, he expounds on the life cycles of plants, flowers and different types of gardens throughout history. “Change will come,” he reassures himself, in every garden’s seasons. He’s hoping for the same for himself. The movie explains why.

Fastidious in the extreme, Narvel is a human stray, taken by the lady of the manor, Norma Haverhill, played by Sigourney Weaver, with whom he occasionally sleeps with in an on-demand sort of arrangement. Into this setting arrives Norma’s grand-niece, now essentially an orphaned, troubled young adult, who needs a refuge and a fresh start. This woman, Maya, played by Quintessa Swindell,becomes Narvel’s apprentice. And later, to Norma’s displeasure, something more.

Schrader enters hothouse Southern Gothic territory with this uneasy romantic triangle. He adds in a lulu of a secret backstory for Narvel, which stays secret for the first 20 minutes of “Master Gardener.” But it’s in the movie’s trailer, and in virtually every review written since the film premiered last year at the Venice Film Festival, so here it is: When Narvel reveals his full-body tattoos to the camera, after his latest nightmare flashback to his literally murderous earlier years, words such as White Pride share his skin with swastikas and skulls.

In the film’s present day, Narvel appears to be a repentant sinner, and a 10-year success story in a federal witness protection program. But Maya’s rough crowd, and her addiction and an abusive sometime boyfriend, brings out the beast within. In the later scenes, Narvel follows the imminent-violence blueprints laid out by everything from “Rolling Thunder” (which Schrader co-wrote back in the ‘70s) to “Taxi Driver” and other films hinging on a lost male, with a pen and a gun, saving a younger female from purgatory.

Like “First Reformed” and “The Card Counter,” personal crises exist in clear relation to political and global crises. In “Master Gardener,” the recent rise in neo-Nazism and more mainstream (though equally sinister) assertions and bloody extremes of white supremacy and anti-wokeness shadow the narrative.

At the same time Schrader, whose movies rarely hew to any one political ideology, dwells in a peculiar combination of romantic pulp — one loner and two available, messed-up women, several decades apart in age — and stark, stripped-down, consciously literary dialogue. (Sample line from Norma: “I came here for a pleasant lunch, and here we are, in the muck of the past.”) The tendrils of metaphor snake all through the storyline; at one point, Narvel in voiceover observes that lavender sage and plum poppies bloom annually, “some years in giddy harmony,” while “other years they barely tolerate each other.” What holds for horticulture also holds for human relations in “Master Gardener,” which rather outlandishly holds out for an uncomplicated and happy ending.

Last year, in a New York Film Festival panel, Schrader acknowledged that earlier drafts of “Master Gardener” had Narvel mixed up with and ratting out mobsters. In rewrites, he made Narvel a white supremacist, looking for redemption, in part simply to take the audience’s mind off what he called the political incorrectness of his May-to-December romance.

It holds together, barely, thanks in large part to Edgerton’s just-so underplaying and resistance to overt dramatics. Weaver and Swindell work valiantly and cleverly to find human beings within their archetypes; there’s a particularly shrewd performance by Esai Morales as Narvel’s witness protection caseworker. He and Edgerton, sitting in a lonely diner as all lonely men prefer, trading Schrader’s subtly potboiling tough-guy exchanges: Those scenes are as plain as can be, but they’re a highly rewarding slice of minimalist movie heaven. Even when it falters, “Master Gardener” speaks from a place the filmmaker has always worked, with one foot in the character-building of “slow cinema,” and the other in spasms of violence. It may be hard to buy where this movie lands. But even an unstuck landing isn’t enough to un-recommend it.

Postscript: The film’s R rating is about right, though it’s typical of the MPA’s unreliability. All the point-blank shootings and leg-crushings don’t merit a one-word mention for violence?

“Master Gardener” — 3 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: R (for language, brief sexual content and nudity)

Running time: 1:50

How to watch: Premieres in theaters May 20

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.

mjphillips@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @phillipstribune