Master Gardener Review: Paul Schrader’s Loose Trilogy Ends With A Whimper

Paul Schrader’s loose trilogy, comprising First Reformed, The Card Counter, and now Master Gardener, has centered lonely men coping with the sins of their past while searching for a way forward in a world that feels alien. In Master Gardener, Joel Edgerton stars as Narvel Roth, a man who tends to the vast and abundant gardens of Sigourney Weaver’s Mrs. Haverhill, seemingly the only person who knows about his violent neo-Nazi past. In a striking moment of intimacy, Haverhill takes Narvel’s shirt off to reveal a canvas of neo-Nazi imagery splayed across his back, but she is not fazed. This scene is intended to be shocking or, at the very least, evocative, but, like Master Gardener itself, it is staid and muted, the last gasp of an effort to connect his two previous films via a thematic framework that has become a bit tired. While Schrader’s directing and the casts’ performances are more than up to standard, Master Gardener somehow ends up being less than the sum of its parts.