Master Gardener (2022)

I loved First Reformed but haven’t really kept up since with director and writer Paul Schrader, possibly due to his obnoxious online presence. I didn’t even know Master Gardener was his until I was looking up information about it before looking at it. But I might have guessed from the basic elements—the deliberate pace and stasis-oriented, off-rhythm editing style of his hero Robert Bresson coupled with one strain or another of American extremism. Here we have Narvel Roth (Joel Edgerton), former white supremacist hit man with a torso full of hate tattoos to prove it, now in witness protection, clean and sober, with a career as a master gardener. We catch up with him working the estate of Norma Haverhill (Sigourney Weaver), who in turn has a grand-niece, Maya Core (Quintessa Swindell), who she wants to put to work learning the trade from Roth. Maya is mixed-race and Norma is an uptight bigot, so it’s not a promising match. This is a movie that doles out information by bits as it goes. It takes a while to get Roth’s full backstory, which is brutal and unpleasant. But that’s all in the past now. He works and is good at his job, he attends NA meetings, and he loves flowers. It’s honestly a bit hard to believe and Edgerton’s studied low-key performance is not that helpful, except the way it sets up and adds to the high suspense that kicks in pretty quick. If there’s one thing Schrader knows how to do it is stoking monomaniacal tension. The best moments in Master Gardener are scenes of great economy that are purely kinetic, as when Roth is traveling on some deadly mission and we ride with him in the backseat, waiting for whatever is going to happen to happen. IMDb has the pictures as a “thriller” as well as “drama” and “crime”—and thriller is where it is best. On some levels it is trying way too hard, as with all the Nazi iconography. But trying too hard is also a long-time Schrader trait—compare Hardcore. Still, if there has ever been a time to think about deadly white supremacists who can be rehabilitated, it’s probably now. And Master Gardener is good enough as a thriller that even if you don’t care about deadly white supremacists you’re bound to get caught up in all the manifold scenes of riveting tension.