The Current Cinema - Barrie Pattison recommends tracking down MASTER GARDENER (Paul Schrader, USA, 2022)

Master Gardener, the new (2022) Paul Schrader has caught up with us.  Since he surfaced with his script for Scorsese's Taxi Driver, Schrader's been one of the most challenging personalities in movies. He's impressive in person. I've watched him front a meeting. One time critic and media teacher, he can talk film and hold an audience as long as the organisers will let him. In his films, Schrader comes close to actually pulling off the stunt of fusing popular culture and high art. Hollywood directors as diverse as Orson Welles, Charles Vidor and Sam Fuller had a go at that with dodgy results.

Master Gardener kicks off with titles on a striking background of stop-motion plants blooming. We rapidly get to characters, whom some commentators find under-written. Sigourney Weaver's first appearance lets us know she's a Louisiana old money society matron from the way she summons her head gardener Joel Edgerton with demands for boosted returns on a charity sale of the flowers he supervises. She refers to her grand niece as "mixed blood." 

Joel Edgerton, Master Gardener

Edgerton is revealed more gradually in blip inserts of him as a bearded member of a black-uniformed militia and shots of him updating a log book - the historic difference between English and European gardens. Like a range of the writer-director's protagonists, his lead here deals with the extremes of experience by keeping a diary that we watch him entering at night, seated alone with a reading lamp and backed by his voice over, like Claude Laydu in Journal d'un curé de campagne. Even more than American Gigolo's re-working of Pickpocket, this is Schrader's closest approach to his hero Robert Bresson - not really a claim to my admiration. 

Quintessa Swindell, Master Gardener 

The girl turns up as twenty something Quintessa Swindell, whom Edgerton finds a suitable pupil. Master Gardener keeps on setting up expectations, which are much more mundane than the ones the film film actually delivers.  Is Esai Morales Edgerton's AA Sponsor or is Edgerton going to be the White Saviour subjugating the rebellious spirit of the girl from the minorities? Their relationship is knowing. "It's always fun to watch grown men in pastel pants out-bid each other over a flower."  

Turns out teacher and pupil both bring baggage.  Schrader likes leaving trails of breadcrumbs. His films are full of material that his followers swoop on. I'm surprised that the mixed notices this has gathered aren't on about about being banished from the garden. 

What we do get once again is shock revelation and ultra violence. I didn't think the film could survive turning the Sigourney Weaver character nasty but Our Man was testing his and the audience limits. Edgerton's amiable, stoic Travis Bickle substitute takes some getting over. They work at it, with him concerned about the fate of the jailed associates he rolled over on, or that of Weaver and even her porch dog after the attack, a not altogether subtle attempt to soften the character. 

Joel Edgerton, Sigourney Weaver, Master Gardener

We note that right wing extremists, as here, and in The Blackklansman or the new Fargo series, have replaced gangsters and Communists as stock villains in Hollywood movies and  quite possibly the U.S. collective mind. 

Technical work and performances are superior, with the support etching their presence in small screen time, but words are Schrader's material. The dialogue registers in the meeting with Morales planting an imaginary gold star on Edgerton's forehead, contrasted with the apparently purposeful replacement. When the characters want sex they verbalise  it, something that some festival audiences couldn't handle. The vandalism of the garden team's loving work is not the shock that the film intends any more than the reveal on Edgerton's tattoos. Schrader can manage wide shot scenics and gives the player's effective close ups, but in the two shots he falls back on, attention drops. I won't buy the labored regeneration symbolism, particularly as visualised with the drive through the flower verge road. Probably the most telling image is Edgerton, the severe black of his work clothes broken by the red patch of his pruning shear  handles.

The conclusion with Edgerton's dismissing Weaver's use of her word ("I've known obscene") is the film's big ask. I don't find it completely satisfying but the film offers more substance than most of what we see, including Schrader's other films. It is going to stay with me. It would be a pity for it to slip by. 

The Current Cinema and Streaming on Netflix - THE STRANGER (Thomas M. Wright, Australia, 2022)

Joel Edgerton, Sean Harris, The Stranger

SPOILER ALERT (A big plot point is given away here)

Hard to know if there are better Australian films released or to be released this year, distribution and exhibition being what it is, but I doubt that there will be anything better, even near as good, as Thomas M. Wright’s The Stranger. It’s a film so full of constant surprise, so full of foreboding and mystery. It also has a moment to moment exactitude and authenticity unlike almost anything else made here. I’m hardly alone. There is already plenty of critical enthusiasm for the film both local,  following screenings at MIFF, and from the international trade press.

 

Where does it settle. Your mind goes to Melville for its policier  elements and to Antonioni for its refusal to be explicatory. These are not the usual sources for Oz film-makers so maybe I’m just guessing, letting my imagination give Wright credit for a deep cinephilic sensibility that may or may not be there. It is after all applied to what is ultimately a very elaborate police procedural, something in the manner of those European crime shows that SBS shows where it takes any number of hour long episodes before the parts finally knit together.

Sean Harris

 

For starters consider the two story lines – Henry Teague (Brit actor Sean Harris) is seemingly inadvertently given a job with hints of it being outside the law. “I don’t do violence” is his only qualifier. He’s brought in at the bottom of a ring of drug dealers and early on we learn that his immediate boss Mark Frame (Joel Edgerton) is an undercover cop. We are led to believe that the story arc is to be about the bringing down of the drug ring. Parallel with this, two police (one of them played by Jada Alberts, no idea about the other) are pouring over a kidnapping and murder case involving the disappearance of a child. 

 

There are two separate narratives operating and what seemed to be the activities of an oafish and threatening drug syndicate is in fact an elaborate police operation designed to entrap. Cops and crooks all speak the same language. All are ineffably vulgar, badly dressed and foul-mouthed. They seem to threaten violence constantly. The actors relish the opportunity and I’m sure that Wright, primarily an actor himself until his two recent features, would have encouraged them. You might even be reminded of Joseph Losey’s The Criminal, another exercise which examines a criminal milieu and allows its actors to relish their parts.

 

Except in The Stranger  there is no violence on the screen at all. Wright’s script, adapting a novel based on a real-life incident talks in whispers, deflections, apologies. Henry constantly says “Sorry, mate” and promises to do better next time 

 

Accompanying this, apart from some drone shots of a mysterious location, is a mise-en-scene devoted to close-ups, blackness, angles that keep characters almost hidden.  It’s a piece of bravura film-making and noteworthy  here especially for its singularity in a national cinema too prone to the safe and straightforward methods of telling a story. 

 

The Stranger  is going to have some theatrical screenings in October before it heads off to Netflix. See it in a picture theatre to get the best effect of its darkness and its complex sense of mystery and dread.