Weaver and Swindell work valiantly and cleverly to find human beings within their archetypes there’s a particularly shrewd performance by Esai Morales as Narvel’s witness protection caseworker. It holds together, barely, thanks in large part to Edgerton’s just-so underplaying and resistance to overt dramatics. In rewrites, he made Narvel a white supremacist, looking for redemption, in part simply to take the audience’s mind off what he called the political incorrectness of his May-to-December romance. Last year, in a New York Film Festival panel, Schrader acknowledged that earlier drafts of “Master Gardener” had Narvel mixed up with and ratting out mobsters. (Sample line from Norma: “I came here for a pleasant lunch, and here we are, in the muck of the past.”) The tendrils of metaphor snake all through the storyline at one point, Narvel in voiceover observes that lavender sage and plum poppies bloom annually, “some years in giddy harmony,” while “other years they barely tolerate each other.” What holds for horticulture also holds for human relations in “Master Gardener,” which rather outlandishly holds out for an uncomplicated and happy ending. In “Master Gardener,” the recent rise in neo-Nazism and more mainstream (though equally sinister) assertions and bloody extremes of white supremacy and anti-wokeness shadow the narrative.Īt the same time Schrader, whose movies rarely hew to any one political ideology, dwells in a peculiar combination of romantic pulp - one loner and two available, messed-up women, several decades apart in age - and stark, stripped-down, consciously literary dialogue. Like “First Reformed” and “The Card Counter,” personal crises exist in clear relation to political and global crises. In the later scenes, Narvel follows the imminent-violence blueprints laid out by everything from “Rolling Thunder” (which Schrader co-wrote back in the ‘70s) to “Taxi Driver” and other films hinging on a lost male, with a pen and a gun, saving a younger female from purgatory. But Maya’s rough crowd, and her addiction and an abusive sometime boyfriend, brings out the beast within. In the film’s present day, Narvel appears to be a repentant sinner, and a 10-year success story in a federal witness protection program. He adds in a lulu of a secret backstory for Narvel, which stays secret for the first 20 minutes of “Master Gardener.” But it’s in the movie’s trailer, and in virtually every review written since the film premiered last year at the Venice Film Festival, so here it is: When Narvel reveals his full-body tattoos to the camera, after his latest nightmare flashback to his literally murderous earlier years, words such as White Pride share his skin with swastikas and skulls. Schrader enters hothouse Southern Gothic territory with this uneasy romantic triangle.
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