Paul Schrader’s pedestrian Taxi Driver reboot repeats his failed spiritual politics.
Know-nothing reviewers have given filmmaker Paul Schrader the appellation “master,” encouraged by his newest film Master Gardener, a semi-autobiographical psychological thriller that confuses social and moral issues — Schrader’s usual affectation toward seriousness.
Joel Edgerton plays Narvel Roth, the film’s narrator, an autodidact who writes doggerel in his private journal, while Schrader shows scenes of him posing as head groundskeeper of Gatewood Gardens. A landmark estate’s gardener, he’s actually under witness protection, revealed through flashbacks of the violent criminal life that led to him squealing on his white-supremacist former fellows. Obviously, Schrader considers himself a master fantasist.
But Schrader was among those Seventies American filmmakers who repressed racial anxiety (back when the blaxploitation movement functioned as Hollywood’s release valve). It was part of the general repression that has become Schrader’s constant theme. The problem is that Master Gardener’s fantasy merely glosses over the social issues it raises.
Roth’s relationships with Norma Haverhill (Sigourney Weaver) — the estate’s haughty, shrewish, horny heiress — and Maya Core (Quintessa Swindell), her estranged, mixed-race grandniece whom Roth is instructed to train and educate, are preposterously contrived. It doesn’t help that Schrader (best known for writing Taxi Driver and Raging Bull and his 2017 film First Reformed) specializes in cinematic didacticism: Roth’s sexual involvements with the older and younger females are unerotic ploys. He has already renounced any private, amatory life for high-minded asceticism, squeezing, sniffing, and tasting soil. Yet Edgerton, the fine Australian actor, speaks in dry, measured, masculine tones — affectations that further suppress American tensions.
Master Gardener merely updates the racial timidity that was subliminal in Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Blue Collar, Rolling Thunder, and American Gigolo, the films that made Schrader’s name. That same self-delusion returns in a form that impresses gullible critics. Norma laments, “Here we are in the muck of the past.” And Narvel responds, “It is a muck farm.” Schrader’s dreary view of America conforms to Biden’s race-baiting games. Note how Gatewood Gardens intentionally resembles a slavery-era Southern plantation, and sporadic references to Maya’s wayward ghetto background nod toward inevitable urban catastrophe — the muck Roth reacted to in his former life. “I thought you should know I was once someone else”: This is how he seduces Maya.
Schrader’s sexual-racial fantasy is both naïve and shameless. Roth, who wears a skull tattoo on his chest plus swastika and SS tats on his back, confesses, “I was raised to hate people who were different from me. And I was good at it.” This is Schrader’s attempt to revive the race issues he and Scorsese hid in Taxi Driver, but the millennium has not enlightened him.
Schrader can’t keep up with the times. He never delivers the promised cathartic climax; Roth’s gunplay simply echoes Taxi Driver’s vigilantism but, given today’s environment, even that plays differently. So does Roth’s being called out by multiracial ghetto thugs, “Hey, chill, Proud Boy!” And Maya’s grumbling, “I can’t even stand to be in the same room with you!”
It’s all topical, yet evasive. Schrader resolves his anxiety when Maya entices Roth into sexual submission. The laughable moment is followed by a psychedelic, postcoital dream sequence of the pair careening down a highway of night-blooming flowers. Clearly, Schrader doesn’t understand conversion or redemption.
Schrader’s failed spiritual politics recall what the great stormy-petrel film critic Robin Wood noticed back when he distrusted Taxi Driver’s conclusion:
[Travis Bickle achieved] some kind of personal grace or existential self-definition, and [that’s] really all that matters, since civilization is demonstrably unredeemable. This is very Schrader. . . . I find it morally indefensible, pernicious, and irresponsible: it implies that one’s existential self . . . also represents a debased and simplistic (again, quasi Fascist) version of Existentialism, restricting it to a matter of the Chosen Superior individual and depriving it of all social force.
That Superior individual — Roth — represents Schrader’s self-sanctification. Know-nothings pretend that Schrader’s Bressonian mannerisms reveal the spiritual depths of contemporary crisis, when, in fact, Master Gardener repeats the same social-collapse paranoia that made secular reviewers overpraise the religious, racial, suicide-bomber topics of First Reformed.
Besides toying with Roth’s white-supremacist repentance and pseudo-redemption, the shallow characters are so unrealized that when Maya asks Roth, “So, who are you right now?” he answers, “I’m just a gardener.” Schrader is lucky that cinema-illiterate Millennials have no memory of Peter Sellers’s gnomic act as Chauncey Gardiner in Being There. Schrader’s feeble, derivative, politically disengaged filmmaking goes back to the worst of the Seventies.