For almost 50 years writer/director Paul Schrader has essayed God’s lonely men; “Taxi Driver’s” Travis Bickle, Julian in “American Gigolo” and “First Reformed’s” Reverend Toller, among others. They are isolated characters, men who live outside regular society, haunted by the lives they’ve led.
In his latest film, “Master Gardener,” now playing in theatres, Schrader adds a new name to his soul-searching rogue’s gallery.
“Gardening is a belief in the future,” says horticulturalist Narvel Roth, played with a quiet intensity by Joel Edgerton, “that change will come in due time.” His words come steeped with meaning. A former neo-Nazi—his repulsive, racist tattoos now hidden under ever-present long-sleeved shirts—he has turned his life around and now works at the stately Gracewood Gardens. The hundred-year-old botanical beauty sits on a property owned for generations by the Haverhill family, and is the pride of mercurial old money maven Norma Haverhill (Sigourney Weaver).
Meticulous and methodical in his duties, Roth cultivates the award-winning garden with a steady hand. It’s a simple, spartan life, ruled by self-discipline and routine.
When he isn’t digging in the dirt, he occasionally visits the big colonial house for a meal, a quick tryst or a consultation with Haverhill. On one such meeting he is told that Haverhill’s biracial grandniece Maya (Quintessa Swindell) will be joining his team. The troubled young woman has fallen in with a bad crowd, and Haverhill thinks the discipline and quietude of working in the garden will straighten her out.
He agrees to show her the ropes, not realizing that her presence will upset the serenity of the garden, his new life and his relationship with Haverhill. “The seeds of love grow like the seeds of hate,” he writes in his journal.
“Master Gardener” observes racism and redemption, wondering aloud if emancipation from the stigma of past deeds is possible.
Roth is a complex character, played like a tightly wound Chauncey Gardiner, whose terrible past presents itself in flashbacks that hint at the maelstrom bubbling beneath his stoic exterior. He is a Schrader architype, a solitary man whose involvement with a protégée could complicate his life, but Edgerton sets him apart from recent Schrader characters with a mix of the serene and physical. The work is both elegant and aloof, straightforward and elliptical, and showcases Edgerton’s charisma and versatility as a leading man, when not covered in a layer of blue make-up.
He is ably supported by Swindell, who brings intelligence and understanding to the role, even if her horror at Roth’s racist past evaporates a little too easily.
Weaver, as a stereotype of every isolated wealthy matron, chews it up, delivering lines like, “I thought you had a green thumb, but it turns out you have a green middle finger,” with gusto.
“Master Gardener” is apparently the wrap to Schrader’s recent Calvanist guilt trilogy. While interesting and as rich in allegory as the previous two films—”First Reformed” and “The Card Counter”—its study of redemption, while hopeful and even-handed, requires too many leaps of logic to fully embrace.
Richard joins Ryan Doyle of the NewsTalk 1010 afternoon show The Rush for Booze and Reviews! Today he talks about how the Moscow Mule was born out of necessity… the necessity to get rid of a few cases of vodka, “The Card Counter” in theatres and TIFF.
“The Card Counter,” the new film from “Taxi Driver” screenwriter Paul Schrader, now playing in theatres, is less concerned with cheating at cards than it is with the heavy conscience of the main character.
William Tell (Oscar Isaac) is a man with a past. Ex-military, he’s haunted by his time as an enhanced interrogator at Abu Ghraib. These days he’s constantly on the move, trying to out run his past, travelling from town to town working as a professional gambler and card counter, a skill he picked up during a stint at Leavenworth.
His past catches up with him, however, when Cirk (Tye Sheridan) makes the connection between his late father, who was driven to violence and suicide by memories of his time as a torturer, William and their commanding officer Major John Gordo (Willem Dafoe). Cirk has a vendetta. He blames Gordo for his father‘s death, and plans revenge.
William sees the messy situation as a chance for redemption. With the help of financial backer LaLinda (Tiffany Haddish), William attempts to right the wrongs of his past, clear his conscience and send Cirk off on a better path.
“The Card Counter” is an austere, intense movie.
Schrader’s trademark anguish permeates every frame. Isaac plays William as a man who has numbed himself to the horrors of his past by adopting a controlled, methodical way of life. It’s his way of reducing memories of “the noise, the smell, the violence” at bay, but he is tormented, and Isaac’s careful performance reveals a man aware that his guilt could overflow at any time. It would’ve been easy to play him as comatose, shut down to real life after the pain he willfully inflicted on others, but Isaac gives him life.
His only way out of the psychic hell his memories put him through on a nightly basis is through helping Cirk to ease the young man’s pain. There are echoes of “Taxi Driver” throughout. Like Travis Bickle, William uses violence to “rescue” an innocent, but unlike Mr. You Talkin’ To Me, William also has a sweet side. His relationship with LaLinda is warm and Haddish’s performance helps show us William’s human side.
Schrader fills “The Card Counter” with not-so-subtle social commentary. One of William’s rivals on the gambling circuit is Mr. U.S.A. (Alexander Babara), a loud and proud player dressed in red, white and blue. He’s an empty shell, a braying show-off whose presence is all sound and fury, signifying nothing. He’s the polar opposite of the self-contained William, a man who has seen the horrors his country endorsed and knows of the personal cost involved. The allegory isn’t delicate but it does feel timely and ripped from the headlines.
“The Card Counter” is another of Schrader’s looks into the soul of, as he called Travis Bickle, “God’s lonely man.” He tempers the darkness with wry humour and even a touch of romance, but make no mistake, trauma lies at the heart of the storytelling, resulting in a tautly told morality play that encompasses the war on terror and the personal cost of military action.
“First Reformed,” the meditative new film from writer-director Paul Schrader is a movie about hope, specifically, the search for it.
Ethan Hawke is a Father Toller, a former military chaplain at the under attended First Reformed Church. New to the church and still stinging from a troubled past he’s akin to another of Schrader’s creations, “Taxi Driver’s” Travis Bickle. He’s one of God’s lonely men, racked with despair, plagued by stomach problems brought on by drinking and thoughts of ecological failure. “I think we are supposed to look with the eyes of Jesus into everything,” he says. While overseeing the heritage church he creates his own “form of prayer,” a daily journal where he documents his crisis of faith.
His personal issues are amplified when Mary (Amanda Seyfried), a pregnant parishioner, seeks Toller’s council. Her husband Michael (Philip Ettinger), an extreme eco activist, is having second thoughts about bringing a baby into a world he is convinced is dying. His apocalyptic view of the world unsettles Toller, feeding his inner spiritual struggle.
Schrader is most famous for writing “Taxi Driver,” “Raging Bull” and “The Last Temptation of Christ,” all deeply spiritual in their own ways. Here he tackles faith head on in his best film as a director since 2002’s “Auto Focus.”
Questions are asked; answers are left in the ether. It’s a portrait of a man in progress, trying to figure out his place in the world, if there will be a world to be part of. Hawke is subdued, handing in an internal performance that creates tension as Toller waits for God to tell him what to do. It is powerful work complimented by strong performances from Seyfried and Cedric the Entertainer as the condescending mega-church preacher Pastor Jeffers.
Schrader makes some bold choices here—the film is unrelentingly sombre—but most notably with the sudden and ambiguous ending. Toller looks to be finally taking control of his life, although the form of his redemption is left open to interpretation. This is Schrader’s ode to Andrei Tarkovsky and Ingmar Bergman, contemplative filmmakers of the past who essayed questions of theology and spiritual growth without judging their characters. Uncluttered and edited with laser like attention to detail, “First Reformed” is a thought-provoking movie that bears repeated viewing.
Auto Focus is basically like a nicely acted, snappily directed episode of E! True Hollywood Story. The account of sitcom star Bob Crane’s rise to fame, first as a DJ, then as the lead in television’s Hogan’s Heroes and fall into the pit of sex addiction and (every actor’s nightmare) dinner theatre has all the elements of great tabloid trash. Top that off with a brutal murder – that may or may not have been a direct result of his years of skirt chasing – and you’re mining pop culture gold. Auto Focus, however, takes itself a little too seriously to be great trashy fun. The movie could have been a wild romp, but director Paul Schrader chose to unfurl the film in a clinical way, which avoids the pitfalls of exploitation, but also sucks some of the fun out of the story. Greg Kinnear plays against his usual good guy type and delivers a vivid portrait of Crane as a superficially smirky shallow man only interested in his hedonistic sex life. Willem Dafoe has the art of playing the villain down to a science and hands in a creepy performance as John Carpenter, the seedy audio/visual salesman who introduced Crane to the world of orgies, swinger’s bars and the naughty possibilities of video tape.
