Bonsai!
Heard it said of Paul Schrader's Master Gardener that it's his umpteenth retelling of the God's Lonely Man trope, starting from Taxi Driver (1976) to three of his last four films including First Reformed and The Card Counter, but I disagree; those films ended with redemption or rebirth or some form of baptism as climax, either through love, or punishment, or blood. This film I think takes up the narrative years later, a 'what happens after?' question hanging in the air.
Narvel Roth (Joel Edgerton) works as senior gardener at Gracewood Gardens, owned by wealthy Mrs. Haverhill (Sigourney Weaver); Haverhill asks Roth to take in her grandniece Maya (Quintessa Swindell) as an apprentice, despite the elder's distaste-- unspoken is the edge to Haverhill's voice as she talks of Maya ("she's mixed blood," Haverhill notes), not obvious but lightly laced round the edges, like cookies dipped in arsenic.
Roth himself has a background; he was a former white supremacist turned informant-- in effect he sought redemption long ago, putting his life in danger and in need of witness protection by turning in fellow supremacists, and Haverhill for all her haughtiness has granted him conditional forgiveness by taking him in and giving him a job.
Roth seems content tho his present life is hardly perfect; there's a hint of corruption to his situation in Gracewood Gardens, in the way he is constantly at Haverhill's beck and call, the way he cautiously taps his boot before climbing up to the porch, the way she looks at him when he stands passively with his shirt off, skulls and Nazi swastika tattoos on silent display. Why does he keep them? Why is there a hint of admiration-- of approval even-- in the way she gazes at them?
I've spoken of Edgerton's meticulously constructed performance but matching him detail for detail is Sigourney Weaver's superb Mrs. Haverhill-- arrogant and charming, and yes I've heard it pointed out not a little racist, but the racism far as I can sense it is so thoroughly folded into her upperclass superiority she doesn't make it easy or obvious: is the lady-- and you can't help but call her a lady-- a rich racist or just a wealthy woman afflicted with racism, maybe something that seeped into her subconsciously in her childhood, thanks to her social position? Swindell plays Maya as cautiously as Edgerton plays Roth-- you suspect she's apprenticing under him as an actor as well as a character.
Horticulture and Schrader fit each other so well it's a surprise the writer-director hasn't touched on the subject before-- Edgerton's Roth is (as with Ethan Hawke's Toller and Oscar Isaac's William Tell) a representative consciousness or stand-in for Schrader, expressing his loneliness, his self-containment, his competence in a number of little skills that prove handy as the plot unfolds. The nature of his skills though-- his total familiarity with various blooms, his knowledge of the care of plant, his literal love of earth as he scoops up a double handful of loam and sniffs it-- the kind of attention to detail Roth lavishes on his work feels not unlike the attention to detail Schrader lavishes on his films. This is an elegantly wrought feature, with meals at Haverhill's dining table shot to look like a meal in an Ingmar Bergman drama, and a key sexual encounter is lit and photographed to resemble the high ritual in an underground cult. Perhaps my favorite shot is Roth marching out of a guest house stuffing his shirt back into his pants, the camera following then taking a Bressonian moment to linger on an empty window in the nearby mansion-- totally irrelevant detail but in the light of later developments one has to wonder: was someone watching?
Even better than the severe visual style is the script, and the way Edgerton tosses off various bits of botanical wisdom like a sorcerer reciting incantations: "Gardening is the most accessible of the arts. It's already there. Every seed is a plant waiting to be unlocked." "People used to walk on the soil; now they walk on tar and concrete wearing rubber soles. They used to sleep on the land, and there was an exchange, and that was a healing process." "The nandina is a species of flowering plant native to Eastern Asia; the smell at certain times of the year is minty with a hint of almond. Gives you a real buzz, like the buzz you get just before pulling the trigger."
That last is pure Schrader, what everyone expects from his films of course but here you sense an attempt at transformation, at growing beyond the definition listed at the back of the seed packet he was delivered in (or, if you like, the Wikipedia entry that pops up with a Google search of his name). Every time a Schrader film is released everyone expects Bressonian austerity with a generous dose of Bergman angst and not a bit of pulpy noir, a 'crime thriller' as the streaming site I saw this on puts it. But Schrader doesn't seem all that interested in the crime aspect, if anything it's a side salad, a sop to those who expect it of him; he's more interested in the characters and their intersecting arcs, and yes in gardening for its metaphoric possibilities.
Theodore Sturgeon put it best I think in his short story 'Slow Sculpture:' "A man cannot create a bonsai, nor can a tree; it takes both...one explains to the tree what one wants and if the explanation is well-enough made, and there is great enough understanding, the tree will respond and obey-- almost.
"Always there will be its own self-respecting, highly individual variation: Very well, I shall do what you want, but I will do it my way.
"And for these variations, the tree is always willing to present a clear and logical explanation.
"And more often than not (almost smiling) it will make it clear to the man that he could have avoided it if his understanding had been better.
"It is the slowest sculpture in the world and there is, at times, doubt as to which is being sculpted, man or tree."
We can dictate what we expect of him but Schrader will do what he wants to do for whatever reason-- in this case pivot towards his other favorite filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu, to celebrate the special qualities found in everyone's everyday lives. And we respond to his response, adjust as he adjusts, and wonder which is really being sculpted, man or tree.
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