A former white supremacist, now in witness protection and yet still covered in tattoos that brand him with a memory of hatred, Narvel becomes swept up in the still-raging storm of the past – a past that is at once distant and recent, collective and individual, and which asserts its ongoing vitality in the present. When Norma arranges for her estranged and drug-addicted grand-niece Maya (Quintessa Swindell) to undertake an apprenticeship with Narvel, the biracial girl’s arrival upsets his carefully measured existence. In Master Gardener, Joel Edgerton plays Narvel Roth, a horticulturist who tends the grounds of the Gracewood estate, a former plantation owned by Norma Haverhill (Sigourney Weaver). It is only now, in what might be the twilight of his career, that he has begun to fully develop his own take on an approach to cinema that began to fascinate him so many decades ago. Prior to First Reformed, Schrader could still rightly assert, as he did in 1976, that “the similarities between my critical thinking and my screenwriting are more coincidental than anything else they just don’t seem to be part of the same thing”. But in large part, interest and opportunity led him elsewhere. His films sometimes flirted with elements of the transcendental style references to Bresson, for instance, are peppered throughout his oeuvre, most obviously in the endings of American Gigolo (1980) and Light Sleeper (1992). Shortly after its publication, Schrader crossed over from theory to practice, largely leaving behind the book’s concerns. Schrader’s 1972 book Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer built on the insights he gleaned as a short-form critic, delineating an ascetic form of filmmaking that “seeks to maximize the mystery of existence it eschews all conventional interpretations of reality: realism, naturalism, psychologism, romanticism, expressionism, impressionism, and, finally, rationalism”. As he wrote that year in a two-part review for the Los Angeles Free Press, this finely chiselled film about a petty thief “concerns the progression of a soul from confinement to freedom” and “end with an inexplicably spiritual act… an unpremeditated act of love” – attributes that notably also mark each instalment of the recent trilogy. In 1969, he saw a film that would transform his life and propel him towards filmmaking: Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket (1959). After a strict Calvinist upbringing, Schrader fell hard for the profane world of the movies and became a critic. But the chilly restraint and pull away from realism found in his three most recent films recall an even earlier moment, one prior to his initial forays into screenwriting and directing. He is perhaps best known as the writer of Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), his second produced screenplay, following on the heels of Sydney Pollack’s The Yakuza (1974). Schrader’s late style takes him back to the start. They are stories of guilt, forgiveness and redemption stories that catch their protagonists in a tangle of worldly trouble and ask whether there is such a thing as righteous violence. These ‘man in a room’ movies follow solitary individuals with pasts that weigh heavily on the present. Schrader has thrown off the weight of studio pressures to work independently, making do with relatively low budgets and holding on to final cut – securing a crucial freedom after feeling that 2014’s Dying of the Light had been mauled by producers. These uncompromising films prove something that feels increasingly impossible in our franchise-laden landscape: American cinema can be profoundly philosophical and have popular appeal. This summer brings the theatrical release of Master Gardener, the concluding entry in an informal trilogy he began with the Oscar-nominated First Reformed (2017) and continued with The Card Counter (2021). The broken-down horse called movies keeps limping on and Schrader is still astride it. Today, the writer-director is as prolific as he has ever been. That decade has come and gone, and things happily haven’t turned out exactly as he predicted.
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