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.