The Master Gardener

Like any Paul Schrader film, this is a story of a sinner’s redemption. Narvel Roth still wears the skin-signs of his murderous neo-Nazi past, That wrath he has converted into a brilliant career in horticulture. He tends the lavish gardens of the socialite Mrs Haverhill — and her more personal needs, as summoned. The latter includes his accepting her orphaned grand-niece Maya as his apprentice. That eventually threatens the grace he has found in Haverhill’s Gracewood Gardens.  

The opening credits play beside spectacular images of opening blossoms. These are individual examples of the ordered constructions of the gardens. The motif establishes the individualism that flowers most healthily when it serves a larger order.   

Roth is eloquent about gardening. He declares it a faith in the future. He describes the garden as an imposition of order on chaos, with various forms at various points in history. After a violent destruction, he lauds the garden’s capacity to rejuvenate itself. These reflections make the film an allegory of political pertinence.  For here gardening becomes a metaphor for social as well as landscape governance.

Behind the title of this master gardener is the “master” race he has deludedly espoused, an assertion that led to mass destruction. In protecting, then loving, the mixed race Maya, Roth completes his abandonment of that blighted ethos. His gardening ethic aligns him with orderly conduct, faith in nature and community and the control and social function of individualism. 

That’s where this film addresses the rising fascist movements especially in North America but also in Europe and beyond. Against their violent individualism Schrader reasserts the values of social harmony, respect and the healthiness and beauty of order. In Maya’s ex-boyfriend’s attack on Gracewood, the swastikas painted on Roth’s cabin walls suggest that Roth was betrayed to the druggies by the cop who had been his handler. The extremist Right, of course, commonly has roots in the police force and army, where their violent impulses can find sanction — and arms.   

As “Gracewood” points to the grace of natural growth, “Haverhill” echoes Miss Haversham of Great Expectations, a wealthy woman frozen in her frustrated past and determined to inflict her power upon those she supports. Roth makes an updated Pip. 

Showing Up

  The last shot in this quiet, brilliant film is an implicit antithesis to the entire drama that precedes it. It’s a bird’s eye view of the two central grad student artists walking off together, about to disappear into the industrialized cityscape. The bird — which we hear but don’t see — is the pigeon that was cripped by Lizzy’s cat and saved first by Jo, then by Lizzy. 

Caring for the bird became a bone of contention between them, though not as serious as Jo’s failure to provide her tenant with hot water. The women’s recovery of civility, community, friendliness, represents the healing power of Nature over its traditional antithesis, Art. 

As the capital A suggests, the Art here is the enclosed artificial world of an art school’s grad program. Writer/director Kelly Reichardt brilliantly catches the character and style of contemporary art schools. In this community there is a pervasive ritual of mutual support, cliches of appreciation. When a ceramic work is spoiled by a burn, the tech claims he prefers imperfections. More interesting, you see. The school bubble is sustained.

The film also catches the Moment of art style and form. Macrame is back. The looms loom large again. The arty and the crafty have re-merged. The students’ openings anticipate the empty chat, posturing and cheese of The Real Art World. Their work is good enough but as typical as their low prospects for successful art careers. Their grad show opening may prove as good as they ever get. 

The best art is heroine Lizzy’s ceramic figures, which out of the kiln freeze the angst and frustration we see in her life. There she primarily suffers by being the only responsible character around. For Jo, seeking out the perfect tire for a tree swing is more important then getting her tenant hot water. Aren’t artists supposed to be more sensitive, more responsible, than the cliche landlord?

And as several characters remark, why would anyone take a pigeon to a vet? In life they are foul pests. In art they are Nature, the superior force which humanity requires we serve even through Art.  

Lizzy’s parents have in effect abandoned their children, especially Lizzy’s mentally afflicted brother. Her father is a retired potter who still spins fictional life successes and is exploited by a couple who pause their travels to live off him. They are the parasitic fossils of ‘60s Bohemianism. They come to the show for the wine and cheese.

When Lizzy’s brother digs a pit in his back yard — Earth Art to express the mouths of Nature we don’t listen to — his work is no more futile than the ostensibly advanced work of the students. Indeed his Outsider instinctive fervour emerges valourized when he  takes the initiative of picking up the recovered pigeon and releasing it.     

As Lizzy’s exhibition opening proceeds we wonder which disaster will ruin her work. The gambolling children? The wild brother enraged he must control his cheese-eating? The father bumbling along? The insensitive Jo? No, all is saved when we remember the reality that our creativity can only emulate and serve. Nature wins out.

The title is of course as rich as the climactic closing shot. Showing up is what we do when we put up a show. But it’s also our quintessential responsibility as artists and as human beings. Showing up, being responsible, saving what life we can.