The Killer in the Garden

A grimly methodical, quiet man tends the grounds of a large estate as 2023's Master Gardener. This latest film from Paul Schrader is a surprising throwback to his movies of the '70s, and is about as good as some of them.

Those who've read Quentin Tarantino's recent book, Cinema Speculation, will have read about how the great American filmmakers of the '70s were all inspired by 1956's The Searchers. In that film, a former Confederate soldier played by John Wayne leads a hunt for the Indians who murdered his brother's family and kidnapped his niece. The man has true racial hatred for Indians, something director John Ford depicts as negative, but good people also want to rescue the niece. The tension in the story is in the value of Wayne's character--is his peculiar tenacity and brutality necessary?

Like Rolling Thunder, Taxi Driver, and Hardcore, Master Gardener is another movie that borrows a basic road map from The Searchers. Joel Edgerton plays Narvel, a man formerly attached to a militant white supremacist group, who now works as a gardener under the witness protection programme. His employer is a wealthy, narcissistic woman called Haverhill, played by Sigourney Weaver.

It's an unusual role for Weaver, a broader character than she usually plays, but she sinks her teeth into it admirably. Mrs. Haverhill seems like she time travelled from the 1830s, a matriarch of a southern plantation. You could see Narvel as an overseer and the team of gardeners who works for him--a white woman, a Mexican man, and a black woman--as his labourers, if not slaves. Then Haverhill gives Narvel a very important charge, her recently orphaned granddaughter, Maya (Quintessa Swindell), whose father was black.

As they work together, Narvel and Maya start to like each other. So he's enraged when her drug dealer beats her up. Maya, like Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver or the porn actress in Hardcore, is kind of a combination of Jeffrey Hunter's and Natalie Wood's characters in The Searchers. She's the victim and also the sidekick foil for racism (Jeffrey Hunter's character had Indian blood).

One could argue that Narvel doesn't really fit the pattern because he's reformed, he turned against the white supremicists and now employs and works with black and Mexican people. But Schrader puts some slightly subtle, slightly conspicuous clues into the film that Narvel may simply have stopped hating non-white women. He makes an odd comment at one point about sexists and the one time we see him interact with a black man it's to immediately crack him in the head with a gun, without waiting for Maya to tell him if he's one of the ones who abused her. There are hints, also in his relationship with Haverhill, that he may have traded militant racism for militant feminism.

The cast is all great and the film is both an engaging action film and an unsettling, menacing vision. I also really love the weird artwork in Haverhill's house.