'Master Gardener' Review: Joel Edgerton and Quintessa Swindell are Astonishing in Odd Thriller
Joel Edgerton and Quintessa Swindell give career-best performances in Paul Schrader’s Master Gardener, an otherwise weird movie that doesn’t really know what it wants to talk about.
I always get excited whenever Joel Edgerton headlines a film, and Paul Schrader’s ‘Master Gardener’ was a film on my radar for a long time. Reviews were either glowing with praise or completely negative when it hit the festival circuit, and my interest peaked even more. Schrader is no conventional filmmaker, and his storytelling approach in recent films like ‘First Reformed’ and ‘The Card Counter’ has been anything but conventional. And while Master Gardener certainly has three terrific performances, it’s also a strange movie, morphing from a meditative drama on the power of plants and gardening to a crime thriller of a white supremacist protecting the one he holds the dearest.
The one our protagonist, horticulturist/white supremacist Narvel Roth (Edgerton), holds dearest is Maya (Quintessa Swindell), who arrives at Gracewood Gardens with a troubled background. Maya shows up for work at the request of her great-aunt, Norma Haverhill (Sigourney Weaver) after Maya has no one to be cared for. Roth takes Maya under his wing, but secrets from his past start to surface when Maya begins to question who exactly the “Master Gardener” is.
It’s unclear exactly what Narvel did and why he is in this position, but Schrader gives slight breadcrumbs of intrigue to hook the spectator until the end, even if there is very little payoff. From our understanding, Roth was on house arrest and collaborated with police officer Oscar Neruda (Esai Morales) to alleviate his sentence. However, the constant cross-cut between Narvel’s “Master Gardener” storyline and his white supremacist/Neo-Nazi past doesn’t coalesce into something tangible and interesting. It’s intriguing, sure, but it severely lacks substance. It’s also challenging for any filmmaker to try and ask their audience to follow a white supremacist turned botanical expert for 107 minutes as he starts to fall in love with someone he has recently met while being somewhat entwined to the person he works for.
There were times when I couldn’t take my eyes off the screen and thought the film moved somewhat at a brisk pace, but other times when I couldn’t wait for the film to end. That’s partly due to Schrader’s fragmented narrative and the multiple inconsistencies he encounters. At times, it works brilliantly, and it’s one of the most riveting crime thrillers of the year. At others, it’s a chore to watch and one of the worst movies of the year. However, it’s never boring, and once you’re somewhat locked into the movie, it’ll be very hard not to want to anticipate what’s next.
But that’s also because Schrader knows exactly what to get out of his actors. Edgerton has never been better. His performance as Narvel is cold, calculated, and thoroughly chilling. Even when he’s being sympathetic toward Maya, it doesn’t feel honest, and you can see in his face the emotional baggage he carries from his unclear past. It’s a lot, but Edgerton fully understands what he needs to do to make his character work. The same goes for Weaver, who chews up the screen with the character who has the best dialogue of the entire thing. One dinner table conversation between the two had me in total stitches — it’s the type of dark humor Schrader loves to put and consistently integrated into The Card Counter.
Swindell also gives the best performance of their career, coming off of a very strong turn in DC’s Black Adam (they had the best chemistry of the whole movie with Noah Centineo’s Atom Smasher). In Master Gardener, they carry as much emotional baggage as Edgerton but in a different and more focused light. Edgerton’s Roth tries to hide what he carries, while Maya frequently opens up to Narvel. It’s an interesting dynamic that Schrader makes the core of his film and the main reason why the movie works.
I’m probably never going to watch Master Gardener again, exactly like I watched The Card Counter once and enjoyed it for what it was. It throws a lot at the audience and doesn’t always work in that regard. But when it works, it’s an incredible feat of filmmaking with three strong performers from two of the best actors working today, Joel Edgerton and Sigourney Weaver, alongside breakout star Quintessa Swindell giving the best performance of their career. As imperfect as this movie is, Schrader’s still got it, and his movies are always worth seeking out.