Filmmaker Paul Schrader is rounding out the trilogy he began in 2017 with First Reformed and continued in 2021’s The Card Counter with a Joel Edgerton–led final installment. Master Gardener (in theaters May 19) furthers the auteur’s exploration of characters reckoning with dark pasts and paving paths to redemption. The drama follows Edgerton’s Narvel Roth, a meticulous, by-the-book horticulturalist who leads the grounds staff at the Gracewood Gardens, an impeccably manicured southern estate owned by wealthy dowager Norma Haverhill (Sigourney Weaver).
His disciplined life is upended when Norma places her troubled young niece Maya (Quintessa Swindell) in Narvel’s care as a member of the grounds crew in an effort to give her some guidance and purpose amid her struggle with addiction. Narvel’s obsessive approach to gardening is what allowed the main character to build himself anew in the wake of previous strife, but as he grows closer to Maya, secrets buried deep in his shameful history are unearthed. “I found a life in flowers, how unlikely is that?” the protagonist muses. It is revealed that his old life involved ties to the Proud Boys—for whom he did no shortage of dirty work, depicted in flashbacks—and a stint as an informant that landed him in police protective custody, which sees him through to a new life and identity at Gracewood.
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Courtesy of Magnolia Pictures
The fictional Gracewood Gardens
Schrader tells AD that the profession of gardening occurred to him first, rather than the theme of moving on from dark times (the tie that binds the three entries of the trilogy), leading him to focus the film on a gardener. “I’m intrigued by occupations which are more complex than they seem,” he says. “Then you root around and find something underneath the occupational cliché.”
Photo: Courtesy of Magnolia Pictures
Joel Edgerton and Sigourney Weaver as Narvel Roth and Norma Haverhill, having a discussion on the Gracewood Gardens grounds
Production designer Ashley Fenton was excited to dig into a screenplay with a narrative so steeped in the intricacies of its set design, given that landscaping provides both a basis for the main allegory of the film as well as its vibrant primary setting.
“The idea of the gardener and the regenerative power of plants, it all works hand in hand [with the set design],” Fenton says. “The metaphor is strong there, and it was a pleasure to try and bring that out. It doesn’t always get to happen. Sometimes if people aren’t noticing [the set] that’s almost the best way to be, but in this one we wanted people to notice, and that’s a unique position.”
Art: David Tureau
A sketch of Gracewood Gardens’s landscaping layout as envisioned by the production’s greensman David Tureau
The production shot for one week in New Orleans, as well as (and mainly) on Saint Francisville’s Rosedown Plantation, in the area’s West Feliciana Parish. As many as 450 people were enslaved on the plantation during the peak years of cotton production, according to Rosedown’s website. Though the filming location’s violent history is not central to the narrative that unfolds there onscreen, it is certainly gestured to with references to Norma having had the land in her family for many generations and being part of the region’s “old money” elite.
Fenton says the film’s greenery department came armed with pallets of flowers and trees to fill out the grounds—a particularly challenging feat even in lush Louisiana due to the filming times during January, February, and March. Some of the florals were added in post-production to supplement. “We were using the actual location as a resource for what made sense for this space, and we wanted it to feel as though the flowers as real [to the space] as possible, even though the story itself is more like an allegory, the most symbolic story of the trilogy,” says Fenton. In preparation, Schrader took a thorough approach to bringing the production designer into his world; he supplied Fenton with a number of gardening books, as well as a few audiobooks he wanted her to simply listen to, just to get a sense of what a gardener’s voice sounded like.
Courtesy of Magnolia Pictures
Walking through the grounds
“In terms of the writing and the passion for the ground, I remember when we were shooting the greenhouse scenes and Joel was meant to be smelling the dirt, he puts it right up to his nose,” Fenton recalls. “Paul showed us what he wanted that to be like, he shoved the dirt all the way up on his face, and when he pulled his hands away, dirt was all over. He was like, ‘This is what it’s all about.’”
Certain scenes in the film use plants to nod directly to plot points unfolding in the central narrative, such as the colorful petal-strewn path illustrating Narvel and Maya’s budding romance. The pair find themselves descending the walkway together in a pivotal scene in which they begin to fall in love.
“It’s almost like at a wedding venue, where you’re looking at a couple’s walk up to an altar. That’s what it felt like to me,” Fenton says. “We tried to pick petals that would be true to the plants that were around them, but we really did just want them to line that space and feel this sense of romance and this hopefulness for this character that we aren’t really sure we want to be redeemed.”
Photo: Courtesy of Magnolia Pictures
Swindell and Edgerton walking a path lined with flower petals, illustrating the burgeoning romance between their characters Maya and Narvel
Extricating himself from the disgraceful dealings of his previous life is something the protagonist connects rather directly to gardening in a number of solemnly narrated voiceovers from Edgerton. In his diary, Narvel waxes poetic on the meaning of manipulating the land, likening creating a life from a seed with gardening to literally building out his own new life through the trade.
While landscaping rightfully stole the show, there were a number of intriguing set elements that pulled their weight in the background, one particularly memorable feature being a commissioned painting of a young Sigourney Weaver.
Art: Emily Phaff
A nude painting of Weaver commissioned by the production for Norma Haverhill’s room
“It was super impactful,” Fenton says of the artwork depicting Weaver’s Norma. As the employer of the entire Gracewood staff, who comes from old money and holds considerable power, it was important to craft an awkwardly imposing setting for Haverhill’s home and bedroom. “It’s so funny too, because you’re in a room that has almost zero furniture in it. There’s almost nothing in there really except for the essentials and then this nude, and it’s meant to make you feel really uncomfortable, which I think was amazing.”
Master Gardener offers one of Schrader’s more optimistic resolutions, a departure for the filmmaker yet one that feels fitting as the resolution to the trilogy. Schrader knows that subject matter involving the main character’s racist background—as well as a central romance with a substantial age gap—wades deep into controversial waters, and has whimsically referred to the movie as “a gumbo of no-nos.”
Photo: Courtesy of Magnolia Pictures
The grounds at the fictional Gracewood Gardens, the set for which is located outside of New Orleans, Louisiana
Narvel, aware of the fraught territory he’s traversing, leans on gardening quotes and theories of rebuilding and remaking over and over again, which he correctly posits as the most natural course of events—more natural than any one thing lasting forever. Following Maya’s discovery of Narvel’s sordid history, as well as an incident at the farm which leaves the grounds in disarray, Narvel invokes the inevitability of regrowth to give credence to his own transformation away from a past he’s desperate to leave behind. “The damage seems irreversible now, but plants regenerate,” he says. “It’s what they do.”