2/22/2024 0 Comments Tim henson talman![]() It’s certainly a movie I found mesmerizing to watch, thanks in part to the dreamy, synthy score by Devonté Hynes (QUEEN & SLIM), also known as Blood Orange. Myself, I’m still not entirely sure what to make of some of those sigh-worthy turns of the story, and that’s okay, even if it makes me like it less than those previous two Schraders. Honestly I was most surprised by a couple things she didn’t sigh at. Could she have wound up here without knowing Schrader’s whole deal? Or maybe she’s a fan, just can’t stand this one. There were four other people in the theater, one loudly sighing her disapproval throughout. An employee at the theater asked me what MASTER GARDENER was, said none of them had heard of it. But it was the week FAST X came out and I liked the idea of seeing them both at their first showings. I was able to see THE CARD COUNTER at one of the downtown multiplexes, but this was a more limited release, only playing at a place I hadn’t been to in years. This is on VOD now, but I saw it in a theater. And you gotta wonder how much he loved repeating a racial slur to Sissy (Matt Mercurio, HELL FEST) or knocking out a random Black friend in front of R.G.’s house. We all love a “you jerks messed with the wrong guy” scenario, but this one’s particular set of skills come from his past as a neo nazi. Oscar retires without following up, so like so many of the Schrader protagonists, Narvel goes over the edge into violence, making us queasy by mixing the appeal of a revenge movie structure with very muddled motives. He asks for help from his case officer Oscar (Esai Morales, NEVER BACK DOWN: NO SURRENDER), who considers him a model ex-offender, but also hasn’t forgotten what his offense was. plausibility.Īt first Narvel tries to do the right thing with this drug dealer situation. I think your response to this one may depend on how much benefit of the doubt you’re willing to give Schrader, and how you weigh the importance of symbolism vs. The most uncomfortable part of the movie, and the part that could be dismissed as a gross male fantasy, is that Maya starts up a relationship with him and only briefly puts it on pause after the revelation of his racist past. (Jared Bankens, “Junkie,” JACK REACHER: NEVER GO BACK). He tries to intervene with Maya’s drug problem and abuse from her drug dealer R.G. And he needs to believe that if a garden can grow back every season then a person can too. It’s partly to show his obsession, but some of it is actually pretty interesting in an “I never would’ve thought of it like that” sort of way. He talks not only about the process, but the history of different kinds of gardens, imbuing different traditions with meaning. After killing for a neo-nazi mentor he turned state’s evidence, went into witness protection, got sober, and dedicated himself to gardening, which he tells us all about in nerdy detail. She wants to see them, she gets off on them, but as far as we can see he is a changed man. ![]() When he first takes his clothes off for Norma we see that his body is covered in Nazi and white supremacist tattoos. Much of the tension and complications here come from Narvel’s secret past, which I had heard as the premise before seeing it, but I’m going to mark this a SPOILER because it might work better as a surprise. When he teaches her to pick up a handful of dirt and smell it, get it on her face, she really does it, and seems to enjoy it. ![]() Maya’s not exactly enthusiastic about the job, it seems like she’s being forced into this as a remedial thing, but she’s open-minded and earns her place quickly. It’s not an odd request on its face, but Norma makes it weird – awkwardly referring to Maya’s mixed race, implying judgmental things about her and her mother, then avoiding ever seeing or talking to the grand niece after she’s arrived. ![]() (According to Wikipedia, Swindell uses they/he pronouns, but the character doesn’t.) He’s very loyal to his aging heiress boss, Norma Haverhill (Sigourney Weaver, ABDUCTION) – including having sex with her on demand – so he does as she says when she instructs him to take on her troubled grand-niece Maya (Quintessa Swindell, BLACK ADAM) as an apprentice. This time the journal-writing weirdo narrator is Narvel Roth (Joel Edgerton, JANE GOT A GUN), the fastidious horticulturalist in charge of Gracewood Gardens, an estate in Louisiana (filmed at a former plantation). Which is one of the things I love about him. This one is thematically related to those, and Schrader has called the three of them his unintentional “Lonely Man Trilogy,” but the template goes all the way back to TAXI DRIVER and has been loosely repeated over and over again throughout his filmography. MASTER GARDENER is the latest from Paul Schrader, who I consider to be on a late career roll between FIRST REFORMED and THE CARD COUNTER.
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