Movie review: Seeds of hope blossom in ‘Master Gardener’

With his latest film, “Master Gardener,” writer/director Paul Schrader closes out an epic trilogy exploring modern masculinity and existential dread. Written with Schrader’s prickly, challenging point of view, and crafted with arch expertise, the “man in a room” trilogy, made up of “First Reformed,” “The Card Counter” and now “Master Gardener,” is unflinchingly bleak and often angry. But in his finale, the auteur reveals himself to be a deeply swooning romantic underneath all the violent stoicism of his protagonists, allowing his hope for redemption to fully bloom.

In 2017’s “First Reformed,” a severe portrait of a pastor struggling with his faith and counseling a young couple through their anxiety about climate change, Schrader looked to the future with dread. Then 2021’s “The Card Counter” saw Schrader analyzing the inescapable sins of the past in the story of a gambler traveling from casino to casino in an attempt to escape the memory of his war crimes. In “Master Gardener,” Schrader once again imagines the life of a man with a violent history seeking to exert some control over his present.

Joel Edgerton, sporting the carefully combed and severely parted hair of a troubled Schrader hero, is chillingly excellent as Narvel Roth, a gardener who shapes the landscape of Gracewood Gardens, an estate owned by the wealthy heiress Norma Haverhill (Sigourney Weaver). His wardrobe is functional and pristine: rubber boots and clean overalls, a ubiquitous pair of nippers tucked in the front pocket.

His life is small and uncomplicated, contained to the estate, living and working on the premises. He writes in his journal about the history and philosophy of gardening, manages a small team, sometimes dresses up for dinners with Norma. He creates order and beauty out of naturally occurring chaos, and it’s clear that this all-consuming existence serves a dual purpose for Narvel – he enjoys the satisfaction of a job well done, a job that helps to keep his demons at bay.

Through discipline, ritual and a meticulous appearance, Narvel keeps his secrets well-hidden, though they threaten to burst forth at any inopportune moment. His past visits in fits and starts – jolting, jarring memories and nightmares of violence and murder and indoctrination, his bloody, gunpowder-soaked memories a contradiction to his coolly controlled exterior.

Complications and conflict arise when Norma informs Narvel that she wants him to take on her grandniece, Maya (Quintessa Swindell) as an apprentice. Maya is biracial (“mixed blood” as Norma puts it, indelicately, as she does many things), and her mother had a tragic life, dying young. Norma makes a grand gesture of hiring her niece but wants no other intimate relationship. There are also certain aspects of Narvel’s history that make his close proximity to a Black woman inherently harrowing, and his latent capacity for violence and intimidation lies waiting to be put to use, ultimately triggered by Maya’s tangles with an abusive drug dealer.

The bleakness and anger that resounds through “First Reformed” and “The Card Counter” has faded away here to something like a resigned sorrow that we can never escape our fates. But a garden is a promise of change, of growth. Can seeds of love grow large enough to choke out seeds of hate?

Schrader doesn’t shy away from the ugly truths in these characters and their dark secrets, flipping over rocks and exposing what’s rotten beneath. But he reserves the most damning commentary for wealthy white woman Norma, played with a delicious campiness by Weaver, who upholds racist and classist power structures, exploiting the labor and bodies of people of color and the working class, hiding her true nature behind a veil of propriety and well-manicured flora.

The miraculous beauty of flowers can cover up many sins, but Schrader doesn’t let anything obfuscate his big, bleeding heart. He boldly embraces a surprisingly romantic ending to his trilogy, refusing to deny his belief that if the soil is turned enough, new growth has the capacity to truly rejuvenate, eclipsing all else. It’s almost radical in its hopefulness, when cynicism would have been the easy way out.