Master Gardener: Paul Schrader's Race Drama-Slash-Love Story Fails to Blossom

By Liz Braun

Rating: C+

Even the most ardent Paul Schrader fan may have issues with Master Gardener, a redemption tale that morphs into an unlikely love story.

The writer-director behind The Card Counter and First Reformed makes a misstep here, courtesy unlikely characters and sometimes mystifying plot changes. Luckily, stars Joel Edgerton and Sigourney Weaver are in top form, which is enough to keep a viewer happily occupied for the first hour.

Racial tension underpins the action in Master Gardener. The story is set mainly at Gracewood Gardens, a private estate distinguished by magnificent grounds and a general antebellum vibe. Gracewood is owned by the patrician Norma Haverhill (Weaver) and her property is overseen by head gardener, Narvel Roth (Edgerton).

Once upon a time, Gracewood was probably a plantation with slaves, and once upon a time Narvel Roth was a violent white supremacist. Narvel is a disciplined individual. He has created a new life for himself as a skilled gardener with a keen interest in the history of plants and seeds. He keeps a horticultural journal about life and work, and his musings are told in voiceover as he writes.

Some clumsy flashbacks offer snippets of a past filled with violence, but initially they don’t reveal much. Still, à la Chekhov, you can’t really show a pack of ignorant thugs hurting each other in the first scene without someone taking a beating by the third, so that particular seed is sown.

Narvel oversees a small staff at Gracewood, where the gardens are a full-time occupation. He also maintains a weird upstairs/downstairs sexual relationship with Norma. She’s the boss — at least until his shirt comes off and all those terrible swastika tattoos are revealed. So far so good.

The storytelling is slow and engaging, with plenty of detail about flowers and planting, and both Narvel and Norma are strange and wonderful to observe. (Edgerton sports a terrifying Crispin Glover-esque haircut for this role, a bit of tonsorial trompe-l'œil right up there with Javier Bardem’s bob in No Country For Old Men.)

It’s a bit stagey, and some of the dialogue will make you wonder what year it’s supposed to be, but never mind. Things take a turn when Norma asks Narvel to take her great-niece under his wing and teach the girl how to be a gardener. The young woman, Maya (Quintessa Swindell) is biracial and she runs with a bad crowd, and it’s obvious from Norma’s flared nostrils that she regards Maya’s branch of the family as unacceptable.

Nonetheless, Narvel takes on the mentor role, and the beautiful Maya proves to be an apt student. It’s a development that should up the racial and sexual tension, but... nah. When Maya’s criminal friends get violent toward her, Narvel takes matters into his own efficient hands. He begins by calmly holding up his best secateurs and schooling the bad guys on what he can snip off with them.

As the tale turns from gardening to macho chaos, Weaver pretty much vanishes from the narrative and Quintessa Swindell subs in, with her drugs ’n’ thugs back story taking over. This is the point at which Master Gardener goes right off the rails, and the remaining action and blooming love story involve dodgy editing and an unpleasant whiff of old-man-fever-dream.

(Here, we’ll spell it out for you: Norma lusting after the much-younger Narvel is presented as unseemly; Narvel’s similar interest in the much-younger Maya looks reasonable and even heroic.)

At least part of the conflict in Master Gardener relies on racial tension, a particularly American obsession that will not translate for all audiences. Every audience, however, is expected to believe that tattoo removal is all that stands in the way of a wildly unlikely May-December romance that comes out of nowhere, lacks chemistry, and looks bad — in a midlife crisis kind of way — on the guy who wrote it. Not to put too fine a point on this.

Master Gardener. Written and directed by Paul Schrader. Starring Sigourney Weaver, Joel Edgerton, and Quintessa Swindell. In theatres May 19.