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.

Compulsive Correction

Many have drawn comparisons between some of the most extreme political rhetoric of to-day with Puritanism but 2018's First Reformed makes the connexion with extraordinary eloquence and consideration. Written and directed by Paul Schrader, it's a bit like a cross between Taxi Driver (which had a screenplay by Schrader) and Bergman's Winter Light. It's the story of a man coming to the end of a rope lead by demons of guilt and conscience, his every step defined by contradictions and seemingly solid, clear, deadly focused rational. Ethan Hawke in the lead role is better than I've ever seen him before and Schrader's filmmaking style is quiet, clear, and powerfully ominous.

Hawke plays Reverend Toller who's in charge of a small, two hundred fifty year old Protestant church in upstate New York. He's got a little bit of a swagger about him and an abruptness that seems out of place with his sincerity and kindness until we find out he used to be a military chaplain. We also learn he had a son who died in Iraq after Toller had encouraged him to enlist because it was family tradition.

One day a young woman, Mary (Amanda Seyfried), asks him to speak with her husband, Michael (Philip Ettinger), about whom she's very worried. Michael is a hardcore environmentalist activist. He wanted Mary, who's twelve weeks pregnant, to get an abortion because he knows there's no hope for the world, that climate change is now an irreversible downward spiral. He doesn't think it's right to bring a child into the world.

Toller, in voice over narration explained by a diary he's keeping for a year, says his discussion with Michael felt like Jacob wrestling with the angel. It is one of the more intellectually stimulating dialogues in recent film history as Toller tries to explain why Michael and Mary should have and care for a child for reasons beyond religious prohibitions on abortion. He explains to Michael that there can be no hope without despair, that life is about holding contradictory ideas simultaneously.

There's plenty about Toller that's contradictory. Like Travis Bickle, he likes to drink even as his judgements on others become less and less yielding as the film progresses. And like Travis Bickle, you can't argue he's all wrong. As Toller increasingly shares Michael's point of view, we can certainly understand the anger he feels at the businessmen and even the man in charge of the megachurch that now owns Toller's church, Joel Jeffers (Cedric the Entertainer). People who have profited directly or indirectly by the destruction of the natural ecosystem.

Schrader and Hawke never flatten Toller, we see the reasons for every step on the path he takes, the exact nature of the questions that torment him and why there's an irredeemable guilt he only half perceives. The problems of climate change and the Iraq war neatly translate into centuries old Puritan psychology in Toller. He's intelligent and wise but it doesn't keep him from abusing alcohol to the point of permanently damaging his health, nor does it keep him from pushing away people who care for him. That may be the greatest difference between Toller and Travis Bickle; Toller's compulsions are driven by a sense of inadequacy and hatred for anyone who does not share in that perception of his inadequacy.

The end of the film, I suspect, is a hallucination, though Schrader leaves it ambiguous. In any case, it makes clear exactly what he tries to tell Michael earlier in the film and what Jeffers tries to tell him--no perfect system or rationale has yet been invented to administer the fundamental needs of humanity. Ignoring this truth, even in the interest of justice, can have disastrous consequences.

First Reformed is free with Amazon Prime.