God's Lonely Man Gets Laid

Paul Schrader iterates on his archetype.

- ALISON WILLMORE

THERE’S NOT MUCH that’s intentionally funny about Narvel Roth, the tormented hero of Master Gardener—unless you count his name, which is memorable in a way that seems counterproductive for a guy in witness protection. Narvel, played with stolid restraint by Joel Edgerton, is the head horticulturist at a privately owned Louisiana garden and a man who’s severe in every aspect of his life, from his professional demean or to his meticulously slicked hairstyle. He’s also a reformed white supremacist whose skin is littered with the tattooed traces of his past life. Still, the audience at the New York Film Festival last fall couldn’t help but laugh when he was introduced writing alone at a desk in the dark like a good Paul Schrader protagonist must. Schrader has had a thing for solitary, obsessive characters throughout his long career as a writer and director—most famously Travis Bickle, scrawling out praise for the cleansing rain from the table in his shithole studio—but in recent years this penchant has become a focal point and, maybe, a fixation, returned to like a puzzle to be solved.