Master Gardener is a 2022 American crime thriller film written and directed by Paul Schrader.
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- Master Gardener is a 2022 American crime thriller film.
- The film was written and directed by Paul Schrader.
- Joel Edgerton, Sigourney Weaver, and Quintessa Swindell star in the movie.
- The film had its world premiere at the 79th Venice International Film Festival on September 3, 2022.
- It was released in the United States on May 19, 2023, by Magnolia Pictures.
- It was announced in September 2021 that Joel Edgerton and Sigourney Weaver had been cast in the film, written and directed by Paul Schrader.
- Filming began in Louisiana on February 3, 2022.
- It was scheduled to take place in the St. Francisville area through early March.
- On February 8, it was announced that two more actors joined the cast, Quintessa Swindell.
- Zendaya was Paul Schrader’s first choice to play Maya, but they couldn’t come to an agreement on what fee she would be paid.
- The haircut that Joel Edgerton wears while playing Narvel Roth in this movie is officially known as an undercut (long and swept back on the top while buzzed short on the sides) but is colloquially known as the “Hitler Youth” or the “Nazi Youth” for its strong association and popularity with the youth organization of the Nazi Party in Germany before and during World War II.
- Though in the twenty-first century the haircut is also worn by many people with no associations with Nazism or fascism, many articles have noted its rise in popularity among far-Right, Neo-fascist, and white supremacist leaders (for example, “A Haircut Returns From the 1930s” by Alex Williams, published in the New York Times on November 15, 2011; “Does This Haircut Make Me Look Like a Nazi?” by Monica Hesse and Dan Zak, published in the Washington Post on November 30, 2016; and “This Wildly Popular Haircut Has a Serious Neo-Nazi Problem” by Scott Christian, published in Esquire Magazine in August 2017).
- In a 2022 interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Paul Schrader spoke about how the style of the film serves to create an atmosphere of unease and unfamiliarity: “Well, there is a coldness; there’s a withheld-ness – in the performance, in the production design. There’s not much furniture around, and what’s with those jellyfish on the wallpaper? So there’s a kind of distance, which is intentional. And that little room he lives in, which makes no sense. So, yes, you’re using those stylistic elements to make the viewer feel that there is a gap between what you want to feel and what you do feel. And that’s a calculated gap that you create stylistically – sometimes by use of the camera, more often by not using the camera, by not giving certain things. It creates a sense of unease, that makes you feel, ‘this could be a story I know very well, but somehow I’m looking at it and I don’t think I know it very well at all.’
- The title has a double meaning. “Master Gardner” designates a certification program, generally under the auspices of universities in the United States and Canada, providing intensive horticultural training to individuals who then go on to use that knowledge of plants in professional or volunteer contexts.
- But “master” is also used here in the context of “master race,” the false, pseudoscientific Nazi worldview that held that so-called “Aryans” (the Nazis’ ahistorical label for blonde, blue-eyed people of German, non-Jewish lineage) were superior to any other groups, especially to Jewish people.
- The film was released in the United States by Magnolia Pictures on May 19, 2023.
- On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 70%, based on 142 reviews, and an average rating of 6.3/10.
- The site’s critics consensus reads, “Master Gardener suggests Paul Schrader might need to find a new patch of creative soil to till, but some strong performances make it difficult to dismiss.”
- On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 63 out of 100, based on 45 critics, indicating “generally favorable reviews”.
- The movie lasts for 107 minutes.
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