Paul Schrader’s career has been eclectic enough to encompass biopics of Mishima Yukio, Bob Crane, and Patricia Hearst; adaptations of books by Ian McEwan, Russell Banks, and Nikos Kazantzakis; genre films that meet the expectations of the horror, thriller, and romance forms; and star vehicles tailored to bring out the best in icons as disparate at Richard Pryor, Richard Gere, George C. Scott, and Lindsay Lohan. But as with John Ford and his cowboys or Martin Scorsese and his mobsters, when we think of a “Paul Schrader movie,” most of us conjure up a very specific set of themes and images—chief among them that of a solitary man in a mostly empty room, writing in a diary.
The image derives, of course, from Robert Bresson’s Journal d’un curé de campagne (1951), but as with the fingers-against-the-glass ending of the French filmmaker’s central masterpiece Pickpocket (1959), Schrader has accomplished the impressive feat of taking that influence and making it his own—partly through sheer force of repetition, but also because he has kept the reference from becoming ossified by thoughtfully adapting it to new contexts. Once the man was a taxi driver, isolated and alienated from the Manhattan surrounding him; later, he was a priest whose church has become hopelessly beholden to capitalist interests. In Schrader’s new film, Master Gardener (2022), the man is Norvel Roth (Joel Edgerton), a former member of a domestic terror group who is now in the witness protection program and seeking absolution for his sins.
Norvel is now a gardener, plying his trade on the plantation of the wealthy Mrs. Haverhill (Sigourney Weaver), from whom he receives room and board in exchange for sex. (The garden here is a metaphor for rebirth and renewal, but also violence and death; the symbolic weight of the plantation speaks for itself.) The plot stirs into motion when Mrs. Haverhill requests that Norvel look after her mixed-race grand-niece, a troubled young woman named Maya (Quintessa Swindell) who struggles with an abusive boyfriend and a drug addiction she shared with her late mother. In his ensuing quest to save Maya from her demons, Norvel and his charge build a dynamic not dissimilar from that of Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle and Jodie Foster’s Iris in (1976), with
