Master Gardener review — a mystery of horticulture and heightened reality

Paul Schrader might be the last man on earth you would choose to get stuck in a lift with. Frankly, the lift might protest too. The filmmaker’s association with bilious misanthropy stretches back as far as 1976, and the script that began his career, Taxi Driver. Schrader often compared himself to its frantic anti-hero, Travis Bickle. His later work did not improve his mood. By 2016, despite directing cerebral, well-regarded dramas such as Light Sleeper and Affliction, mainstream Hollywood had clearly made its last Paul Schrader film. “Fuckers,” he replied in one typical interview.

Naturally, we now have Master Gardener, the latest instalment of an unlikely comeback. Schrader and his troubled men unto themselves have returned to vogue. As per the title, the new film concerns a horticulturalist, Narvel Roth, played by Joel Edgerton. That much feels oddly playful. Wait. Paul Schrader has made a movie about the simple joys of successful hydrangeas? (Actually, in a sense: yes.)

As Narvel tends the grounds of a grand house somewhere in the American South, we try to guess what could be wrong with this picture. Intrigue takes root between Narvel and his employer: icy blueblood Norma Haverhill, brilliantly played by Sigourney Weaver with a hint of Sunset Boulevard. The murk gets denser still with the arrival of her grand-niece, Maya (Quintessa Swindell).

Two female leads, then, though it falls to a male supporting character to wear a T-shirt reading “We Should All Be Feminists”. What is Schrader up to, he’d obviously like us to ask, given he has lately embraced a media role as cartoonish fist-waver at “wokery”. But his actual films have always been more elusive and intelligent than this shtick implies. That too was true dating back to Taxi Driver, to which Master Gardener sometimes bears a family resemblance — if gentler, sadder and more strangely hopeful.

A spoiler warning: see you in the next paragraph if you wish. A puzzle piece slots into place when Roth reveals a torso covered with white supremacist tattoos: the kind that speak to an organised past, and a new legal identity. If you wondered “what sort of name is Narvel Roth?” the answer is not just the sort Paul Schrader makes up. It’s what he imagines the FBI make up.

Despite his first calling being the typewriter, Schrader’s scripts can be his weak spot. His stories always unfold in a heightened movie reality, but here actual reality can really feel a distance away. And the screenplay loves the spotlight, stacked with self-regarding lines that beg the suffix said no one, ever. “There are things you know in your flesh,” Edgerton broods. “Your nostrils.”

But Schrader is more than the sum of his over-writing. Edgerton, Weaver and Swindell make the emotion behind the dialogue plausible. That takes good actors. It also needs a filmmaker who, for all his bluster, knows how to draw out excellence on camera.

Another Schrader directs his movies: a sure hand working in crisp, clean lines, dealing provocatively but chewily with high-risk themes such as the American past, the American present. And redemption too, of course, the stuff of countless hokey Hollywood narratives. Schrader has spent a career mapping it more honestly; he does the same again here. You start, he says, by telling the truth.

★★★☆☆

In UK cinemas from May 26