‘Master Gardener’ Has Paul Schrader Finding Hope

The Big Picture

• Master Gardener continues the thematic thread of Schrader’s past works, exploring the struggles of lonely, immoral men grappling with masculinity and morality in a broken society.
• The film takes a risky dive into bleak territory, delving into the dark past of the protagonist and challenging viewers to see his story through to the end.
• Unlike previous films, Master Gardener offers a hopeful resolution, allowing Schrader to look forward to telling new kinds of stories while tying up the evergreen themes of his past works on broken masculinity.

In 1976, Paul Schrader‘s screenplay for Martin Scorsese‘s Taxi Driver catapulted him to new career heights, but the film also established a thematic thread Schrader would continue to pull at for decades. “God’s lonely man,” as Travis Bickle refers to himself, has become the key archetypal figure of Schrader’s filmography, insular men who are struggling with masculinity and morality in what they view as a transgressive society. In 2017, Schrader released the critically acclaimed First Reformed which starred Ethan Hawke as Reverend Toller, a man struggling to reconcile his faith and his feelings about humanity’s role in the climate crisis. Unbeknownst to Schrader at the time, this would be the first entry in an informal series which has been dubbed the “Man in a Room” trilogy. The second film, The Card Counter, released in 2021 and followed Oscar Isaac as William Tell, a veteran who served prison time due to his role in the abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib. Magnolia Pictures quietly rolled out the third film in this trilogy in 2023 after a festival premiere the year prior.

This film, Master Gardener, finds Joel Edgerton in a similar place as a man who is grappling with his past transgressions, searching for redemption in a world which seems increasingly hopeless. Master Gardener follows Edgerton as Narvil Roth, a quiet gardener at a large estate owned by Sigourney Weaver‘s Norma Haverhill. Roth meets a new apprentice Maya, portrayed by Quintessa Swindell. Maya is a younger woman who recently started working at the garden and struggles with drug use. The relationship they develop is complicated by Roth’s dark past, and this conflict is where the motif of lonely, immoral men in Schrader’s other work comes full circle.

‘Master Gardener’ Builds on the Themes of Schrader’s Past Work

In Master Gardener, Roth and Maya develop a close relationship, before the audience, and eventually Maya, are shown that Roth is a former Neo-Nazi who came into his gardening work through the witness protection program. This dark turn tears at the fabric of their relationship, and challenges viewers to see Roth’s story through to the end. It is a risky play to delve into such bleak territory with the protagonist of a film, but the challenge is worthwhile to those who are interested in Schrader’s perspective, if not on race issues than on the concept of redemption, and where there is room for the men Schrader has spent decades making movies about to grow and change for the better.

Schrader’s Taxi Driver screenplay established an archetype that would be the central figure in many of Schrader’s most notable works. Travis Bickle, portrayed by Robert De Niro, is trying to do right by a society he sees as fundamentally broken and corrupt to the core. Bickle, steeped in despair and blinded by delusional thinking, recedes further into his own psyche with disastrous results. His kind of loneliness, compounded by misplaced rage and a feeling that he is meant to do something great, makes Bickle a fascinating and disturbing blueprint for Schrader’s protagonists.

Despite similarities found in films like Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, directed by Schrader, or Raging Bull, another Scorsese collaboration, none of these protagonists are carbon copies of one another. The core commonality is a struggle between their internal problems — which often stem from unhealthy perspectives on masculinity — and feeling that the society they inhabit either no longer needs them to function. The modern approach of Schrader’s work is that Hawke, Isaac, and Edgerton all portray men who are familiarly angry and desperate, but instead of being angry at the world, they feel as though they do not deserve to be a part of it because of their dark pasts.

With ‘Master Gardener,’ Paul Schrader Finds Fertile Soil for a New Stage of His Career

First Reformed sets up many of the same conflicts that would be reflected in Master Gardener. A lonely man looks back on his past in a manner which causes him to lose sight of how to move forward. Reverend Toller is burdened, not by an individual moral failing, but by the broad dismissal of the sins all of humanity have committed against our own planet. Toller cannot reconcile these feelings in a healthy way, and the film ends on a note which can be read in many ways. Radicalized by his perspective on the climate crisis, and wracked with guilt over his inability to fix any of these problems, Toller plans a violent demonstration of his feelings which is ultimately prevented.

The ending is dark when taken at face value. Toller’s plan to blow up his church is thwarted by the presence of the woman he has developed a close relationship with, portrayed by Amanda Seyfried, and he instead self-mutilates with barbed wire before preparing a glass of drain cleaner to drink in order to kill himself. It is not made clear whether Toller is saved by her intervention or goes through with his plan, but the film’s abrupt ending is a disturbing one even if his fate was not yet sealed.

In The Card Counter, Tell is an ex-convict gambler with a dark past abusing prisoners of war during the Iraq War. He is unsatisfied with any vanity or eccentricities in life, and prefers a routine so stringent that he eventually comes to the conclusion that he cannot be comfortable in the outside world, even after developing a relationship with a gambling acquaintance portrayed by Tiffany Haddish. Tell engages in one final act of violence against a private defense contractor portrayed by Willem Dafoe, the man who oversaw Tell’s actions and used him and others as a scapegoat to avoid serving any prison time himself. Tell turns himself over to the authorities, and returns to a solemn life in prison where he is visited by his newfound love.

In Master Gardener, Roth does confront his past violently, but the resolution finds him forgoing the self-destruction that many of Schrader’s protagonists often arrive at. Instead, Roth finds his way out and his relationship with Maya is indicated to be in good place. The film, ending with the two of them dancing on his porch, finally puts away the anger and pain that has been at the forefront of these stories.

Master Gardener presents answers to questions that many films would be too afraid to ask. Through decades of variations on this form, what sets apart Schrader’s latest film is the resolution. Master Gardener, which deals in some of the darkest and most controversial subject matter of these films, manages to end on a hopeful note. The film feels like a post script on this form, a pulling up of these evergreen themes of his most notable works. What we are left with is a movie that allows for Schrader to look forward to telling a completely new kind of story, while sending off this latest stand-in for God’s lonely man on an unexpected, sentimental note.

The foundation of Schrader’s work on Taxi Driver provided decades of fertile soil for his explorations into broken masculinity, but Master Gardener— through this deeply corrupted conflict resolving on a hopeful note— razes the creative ground of his work for new seeds to grow, perhaps ones which will yield far fewer thorns. The seeds of hate have been supplanted by seeds of love.