Master Gardener. Master(ful) Filmmaking.

Despite the various tortured gardening metaphors.

“‘All that is very well,’ answered Candide, ‘but let us cultivate our garden.’”

– Candide, Voltaire, 1759

A late-period Paul Schrader movie (arguably even further refinements of the Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976) formula) is certainly a known quantity. He is Robert Bresson’s most ardent American disciple — right down to the obsession with journal writing — and tells stripped-back, minimalist, un-flashy tales. So before watching Master Gardener (2022), the culmination of a thematic trilogy alongside First Reformed (2017) and The Card Counter (2021), I knew more or less what to expect. 

What I didn’t expect here, was the odd tenderness imbued into every frame, using its main (at times rather tortured) gardening metaphor to explore the possibility of genuine personal growth while (mostly) putting darkness and violence to one side. While it certainly follows the formula of the last two films, Schrader’s fresh perspective makes it the most hopeful of the three. It’s like looking at the same sculpture from a different, more sympathetic angle.

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