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. 

Streaming - John Baxter gives attention to a film that slipped under the Covid radar - MY SALINGER YEAR (Philippe Falardeau, USA, 2021)

Margaret Qualley and that portrait

MY NEW YORK YEAR. 

            My first American literary agency was a three- or four-person operation occupying a cluster of rooms on the twenty-somethingth floor of a ‘thirties building in mid-town Manhattan.  It subsisted almost entirely on tending the estates of past clients, now long-dead, whose portraits decorated its walls. 

            The proprietor, then in his eighties, had known all of them as friends, and could be amusing about their eccentricities. He was not without a few himself. Outside his window, Astroturf covered a terrace the size of a golf green. On quiet days, he would step out with the Ben Hogan driver he kept in the corner of his office and, indifferent to where they landed, whack a few Titleists into the smog of East 24^thStreet. 

            His assistant, une dame d’un certain age  who had been, and perhaps still was, his lover, satisfied my curiosity by taking me down into the sub-sub-basement where a room was crammed with steamer trunks, each stencilled with an illustrious name. Within them was the accumulated correspondence and memorabilia of that particular literary great.

            A treasure trove for the biographer, I suggested. She glared.

            “Those vultures? Never. They know nothing about these....”  She ushered me out,  slamming and double-locking the door. “....and they never will, as long as I’m alive.” 

            I thought of her while watching My Salinger Year (aka My New York Year), the latest film by Quebecois director Philippe Falardeau.

Director and co-writer Philippe Falardeau

            As the walking wounded movies of the pandemic begin to limp into the light, it’s become more interesting, at least in France, to monitor broadcast video and streaming outside Netflix and the other major sites. The 2021 My New York Year/My Salinger Year had some kind of release, even, apparently, in Australia, early this year,  but otherwise sank without trace. It deserved better, if only on the basis of Falardeau’s  tragi-comic The Good Lie, (2014) about a well-meaning Reese Witherspoon trying to integrate the remnants of a tribal Sudanese family into white middle-class Canada.

            Mike Nichols’ 1988 Working Girl set the bar high for stories of modern young women striving for business success. Sigourney Weaver dominated that film as the manipulative boss who is also a role model for upwardly mobile Melanie Griffiths. Weaver appears again in My New York Year  as the literary agent, blessed (or cursed?) with reclusive author J.D. “Jerry” Salinger as a client.  In a manner which, probably not by accident, echoes Anne Hathaway as the neo-fashionista in The Devil Wears Prada, Weaver’s naive assistant Joanna Rakoff (Margaret Qualley) must stifle her own creative ambitions to help insulate Salinger from his intrusive public. 

            The story has its basis in fact. In the mid-nineties Rakoff left California to work at Harold Ober Associates, a revered New York literary agency. Sigourney Weaver is a thinly-disguised portrait of senior partner Phyllis Westberg. 

Sigourney Weaver as Phyllis Westberg

            Falardeau, who co-wrote the script with Rakoff, wisely declines to concentrate on Salinger. Tim Post plays him in a couple of near-anonymous appearances but he’s mainly present as a husky telephone voice and that familiar portrait from his Catcher in the Rye days, prints of which dominate the Ober office like a religious ikon.

            The film focuses instead on Joanna’s struggles to reconcile real life with the fantasy of literary success.  In typical bildungsroman fashion, she learns that, when life and legend conflict, printing the legend is only a short-term solution. 

            She tries anyway, dumping her well-meaning Californian lover for an edgy New Yorker, only to impair that relationship by exercising her new-found critical abilities on the manuscript of his novel. At the office, she tries to second-guess her boss about a new book from young-adult author Judy Blume, pleading the cause of art against money. Most disastrously of all, she’s tempted, a la Miss Lonelyhearts, into replying personally to one of the weekly harvest of letters to Salinger which it is part of her job to shred. 

            At the end of her year, Joanna must decide whether to join Margaret on the battlements, defending commerce from the attacks of art, or take arms with the hungry generations battering at the gates. No prizes for guessing which way she jumps.

             My New York Year, uncertain with whom to sympathise and anxious to show every facet of Joanna’s dilemma,  bites off more than it can chew. As in The Devil Wears Prada, the late introduction of a back-story for her boss, revealing a complex private life, forces us hurriedly to reassess the character of Margaret, something done more deftly by Aline Brosh McKenna in the earlier film. 

            Nor does Margaret Qualley’s Joanna convince as someone who might, in time, succeed as an  author. Her total published work, two poems in The Paris Review, doesn’t suggest it acts on Salinger’s advice to write every day, while her near-reverence for The New Yorker, a visit to the offices of which is staged like the pilgrimage to some sacred site, argues against the independence of spirit that might earn success. She’s first and last a fan, and long before she sees it, we accept that Salinger is right to isolate himself from such people. The love of one’s admirers, even those as sincere as she, can be toxic.  Look what happened to Orpheus. 

***************** 

MY SALINGER YEAR was released in Australian cinemas nationally by Palace Films in January 2021. It came out on DVD and Home Entertainment (iTunes, Fetch, Amazon etc) through Madman Entertainment on 21 April.

It is presently also available to stream on Binge and Foxtel Now.