Lies, deceits and a final reckoning

   With the movie Oh, Canada, director Paul Schrader adapts Foregone, a novel by Russell Banks, who also wrote Affliction, which Schrader turned into another of his movies in 1997. Schrader's latest movies (First Reformed, The Card Counter, and Master Gardener)  have had a strange stillness, as if the director has moved beyond storytelling into a near meditative state. 

  Full of fraught memories and soul-wrenching torments, this meditative state isn't marked by calm or clarity. It's full of reckonings.

   Richard Gere, who starred in Schrader's American Gigolo (1980), reunites with the director to play Leo Fife, an American-born documentary filmmaker who fled to Canada during the Vietnam War. 

  Riddled with cancer, the aging Fife has agreed to allow two of his former students (Michael Imperiole and Victoria Hill) to make a documentary about his life and work. Fife insists that the interview -- really an extended deathbed confession -- be conducted in the presence of his wife Emma (Uma Thurman).

   Gere has been made to look gaunt and wasted. Cancer devours Leo's body, but lies and deceits eat away at his soul. He hopes to set the record straight. But Schrader has too much integrity to turn the story into a tale of last-minute redemption.

  Schrader fragments the story so that we see Gere playing Fife at various stages of his life. For the most part, though, a younger Fife is played by Jacob Elordi. Gere and Elordi create an account of Fife's life that may be distorted by memory but nonetheless makes a mockery of the director's reputation as a filmmaker of courage and conviction.

   An early episode illustrates the point. Fife, then married to his pregnant wife (Kristine Froseth), agrees to run the family business of his wealthy father-in-law, abandoning dreams of teaching and writing. He soon employs his modus operandi concerning women, he flees.

   Because Fife makes films, it's tempting to look for spiritual kinship between Fife and Schrader, but such speculations can be dicey. Leo Fife built a reputation by being a good filmmaker, but he has no laurels on which to rest. The scaffolding that upholds his vaunted stature has been subject to rot. Exposing it doesn't make it a less bitter pill to swallow.

'Master Gardener' intrigues, confounds

 

    Sometimes I wonder how keenly Paul Schrader, like some of his characters, feels what it’s like to reside alone in a dimly lit room with an alarming lack of amenities. I thought about this after watching Joel Edgerton in The Master Gardener, the third in a string of movies Schrader began six years ago, the other two being First Reformed (2017) and The Card Counter (2021).

   Schrader is one of the few directors who seems to pursue his interests wherever then take him and they often take him to dark places. Remember this is the guy who wrote Taxi Driver, perhaps director Martin Scorsese's most luridly compelling movie.

    In The Master Gardner, Schrader, as he often does, charts another search for redemption. But the movie resists categorization. Despite the specificity of its settings -- a garden tended by Edgerton's Narvel Roth,  a few downscale southern neighborhoods, and several last-resort motels -- Master Gardner can't be taken as realistic. 

   The Master Gardener isn't exactly dreamlike either; it occupies a world scoured of human bustle and although the characters don't always make sense -- at least when you step back for further reflection -- Schrader encourages buy-in while you're watching.

    Working minimally and with his emotions clipped as tight as his slicked down hair, Edgerton plays a former Neo Nazi living in the witness protection program after turning on nine of his former colleagues. Narvel since has tried to rehabilitate himself by becoming a skilled gardener: He heads the team that takes care of a showpiece garden for a wealthy woman (Sigourney Weaver).

    Sigourney’s Norma Haverhill (yes, the name sounds Dickensian) saw something in Narvel and took a chance on him -- or maybe she got an erotic charge from sleeping with a guy with a spray of SS and white supremacist tattoos that are revealed when he removes his shirt. Narvel's torso has become a poster for his past. Usually, he keeps it covered.

      None of the characters are easily understood. Weaver's Norma has a cruel streak fortified by flinty determination. Norma can be beneficent but she's also threatening and severe. She doesn’t like to be questioned.

   The arrival at the garden of Norma's grandniece, a mixed raced young woman played by Quintesssa Swindell, gives the story a jolt.

   Norma instructs Narvel to take Swindell's Maya under wing, educate her in the horticultural arts, and prepare her to inherit Gracewood Gardens. He obliges.

    A fast learner, Maya adapts to the gardening life and begins to develop a close relationship with Narvel.

    Despite bits of gardening information that are dispensed during Narvel's narration of the movie, Schrader isn't content simply to putter around the garden. When he brings Maya's drug-dealing ex boyfriend (Jared Bankens) into the story, the winds of corruption begin to ruffle the flower petals.

     The plot, such as it is, finds Narvel and Maya getting crosswise with Norma. Putting on her most judgmental face, Norma expels them from the garden, turning them into an unlikely Adam and Eve.

    Time for the elephant in the room.

    How can an intelligent woman of color, even one such as Maya who’s addicted to drugs, fall for an older man who happens to be a former white supremacist? Narvel is supposed to have seen the error of his brutal ways, but Edgerton keeps us away from Narvel's inner life. Flashbacks to Narvel's violent racist days haunt him but he carries himself stiffly, like a dutiful soldier who's following a new set of orders.

     Perhaps we’re meant to think that Narvel channels his former racist fury into a commitment to protecting Maya, a woman whose existence represents the racial mixing he once despised. 

    But Maya isn't a helpless damsel in distress; she's got some fire of her own. She doesn’t ignore Narvel’s past. Still, it’s a stretch to think she could live with it.

     Schrader builds toward a violent confrontation. In Master Gardner, violence can be both destructive and purgative.

    Schrader mixes beauty and shabbiness and leaves us to ponder deep questions: Can the most rotted among us find redemption? Can the corruption of the world be detoxified by those who've helped corrupt it? Can what has been destroyed by hate be restored by love?     

     So where do I stand on the movie? I'll say only this:  It sometimes can be better for a movie to be interesting than gratifying and whatever else I thought about The Master Gardener, I did find it interesting. 

    Such a movie, even when not fully realized, can reflect the uncompromising integrity of the artist who made it. That’s something to consider.

Major violence, small rewards -- and no saints

 

There Are No Saints wrapped in 2013 and evidently has taken its time finding a release date. Paul Schrader, who wrote the screenplay, reportedly planned to direct the movie which wound up in the hands of director Alfonso Pineda Ulloa. Schrader's involvement creates hope and expectation. Sin, violence, and the search for redemption ripple through Schrader’s work. Remember he wrote Taxi Driver and other movies for Martin Scorsese. Some of Schrader's concerns turn up No Saints, an over-the-top, overly violent story about a newly released convict (Jose Maria Yazpik) with scores to settle. Yazpik's character is known as "the Jesuit." Why? Like Jesuits during the Inquisition, Yazpik's Neto Niente is adept at torture.  Niente is drawn back into the criminal world when his son (Keidrich Sellati) is kidnapped and hauled off to Mexico at the behest of a major mobster. The supporting cast includes Tim Roth, as Niente's attorney, Paz Vega as Niente's ex-wife, and Shannyn Sossamon as a woman who accompanies Niente when his search extends into Mexico. Stoic and scary, Yazpik gives a no-nonsense performance and the rest of the cast, notably Neal McDonough as a mid-level drug dealer, and Ron Perlman, as the character pulling the plot strings, hit the right notes. There Are No Saints pulls no punches but its ending includes a harrowing (sickening would be another word for it) twist. To summarize: There Are No Saints may be too eager to play the down-and-dirty game and too thematically slim to find cinematic redemption. If you're looking for something recent by Schrader, try last year's Card Counter.

A cleric caught in a web of torment

Paul Schrader’s First Reformed, a movie with which to reckon.

In director Paul Schrader's First Reformed, Ethan Hawke plays a minister who presides over the First Reformed Church, a once-proud but diminished church in upstate New York. Hawke's Reverend Toller wears a constricting clerical collar that seems more of a choice than a requirement. When he's outside of the church a long black overcoat gives him an ominous look, as if he's wrapped himself in a cloud of heavy gloom.

Toller stands on an altar built from personal guilt. As a former military chaplain, he sold family tradition to his son, urging him to enlist in the military. The young man followed his father's advice and was killed in Iraq. Toller's wife subsequently left him. From the look of things, Toller has spent the ensuing years turning his life into a form of punishing penance.

Toller's church is part of a larger organization run by a minister (Cedric Kyles, a.k.a. Cedric the Entertainer) who understands the business of operating a mega church and wants to create a successful event as First Reformed approaches its 250th anniversary, an occasion that's to be celebrated with a reconsecration ceremony.

Worried about Toller's obvious depression, Kyles' Pastor Jeffers cautions that even Jesus didn't spend all his time in the Garden of Gethsemane. He thinks Toller should lighten up.

Both Toller and his church seem to be stuck in a harsh spiritual winter. Once a stop on the Underground Railroad and a bastion of fiery abolitionist morality, First Reformed now tries to get by with a depleted gift shop. It has become a minor tourist attraction.

Schrader broadens the movie's thematic reach by linking the future of the church to ecological plunder. Jeffers and Toller are supported by Balq Industries, a company run by Edward Balq (Michael Gaston), a businessman who represents a more-or-less American attitude about separating business practices from religious dictates that might -- if taken too seriously -- interfere with those same practices. Balq is one of the country’s major polluters.

Sparse and austere, First Reformed does have a plot of sorts. Mary (Amanda Seyfried), a young pregnant wife turns up at First Reformed to talk to Toller. It turns out Mary's husband (Philip Ettinger) does not want her to bring a baby into a world that he believes is headed toward an irrevocable environmental catastrophe. Mary wants Toller to convince her husband to support her pregnancy.

Toller visits Ettinger’s Michael to see what he can do to persuade the young man that all hope is not lost. Schrader then does something truly rare in movies: He allows two characters -- Toller and Michael -- to engage in an extended philosophical conversation, the kind with consequences. If the world is bleak, diminished and joyless, can survival still have any meaning?

Michael soon answers the question for himself by blowing his brains out with a rifle.

Michael, who has flirted with ecoterrorism, serves as a kind of catalyst that pushes Toller deeper into a torment that's expressed in a journal that he keeps and which serves as the movie's narration. Toller, by the way, already is suffering from a serious but unspecified illness that he insists on ignoring. He urinates blood, the life leaking out of him.

Toller apparently has had a fleeting affair with a choir director (Victoria Hill) who clearly cares about him and fears that he’s unraveling. In a moment of swift and perhaps unforgivable cruelty, Toller rejects her.

The increasingly distraught Toller begins to wonder whether Michael may have been right. Perhaps an act of terror, namely a suicide bombing, is the only way to draw attention to the monstrous crimes that are being committed against God's creation.

Schrader, who wrote Taxi Driver, is no stranger to compelling but tormented characters. Although all the actors in First Reformed are good, Schrader puts the movie squarely on Hawke's shoulders. It's no easy job. Hawke plays a character who lives on a fault line of irreconcilable contradictions.

At one point, Toller even offers a version of the famous F. Scott Fitzgerald definition of a first-rate intelligence: "the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function."

In Toller's case, those contradictory ideas involve pain and pleasure, love and the futility, guilt and redemption. Schrader pushes those ideas to extremes that result in an ending which is both unforgettable and which surely will puzzle many viewers. I won't describe it here but I believe it is intended as a moment in which Toller's fragmented soul achieves its unity.

The movie's images are spartan and purposefully depleted -- right up until the point when Schrader includes a fantasy scene in which Toller and Mary float over the world, a visual precis of the movie’s diagnosis of the material world that begins with a natural idyll and ends with ecological catastrophe.

For those who are new to Schrader's work, it's worth knowing that when he as a young film critic, he wrote an important book: Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dryer. Those familiar with that book and with the work of the aforementioned directors will note the way their influences play out in First Reformed. (The book has been republished with a new forward and with Schrader's observations about additional directors.)

The style to which Schrader refers has to do with holding images until they teeter on the edge of boredom, of not providing a lot of visual cues but demanding that viewers explore the images that are put in front of them, of limiting the use of music so that when it’s heard, its impact is heightened, of providing eventual release for emotions that have been tamped down throughout.

Schrader, a man of serious concerns, has managed to spend a life in film. He has written for Scorsese -- not only Taxi Driver, but Raging Bull (as co-writer), The Last Temptation of Christ and Bringing Out the Dead. His own movies include American Gigolo, Blue Collar, a remake of Cat People, Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, and Affliction.

Schrader can be a confounding figure who both understands Hollywood and who follows an auteur's lonely path. I'd be lying if I told you that I totally "get" Schrader, but I will tell you that First Reformed stands as a stark work that resounds with cinematic echoes (Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest, for example) and yet feels rooted in the present moment of threat, disunity and unbridgeable moral gaps. It is a work that isn't' afraid to look at something most movies try their best to avoid: deep despair.

Hitchcock/Truffaut, an illuminating duo

A documentary that takes us inside the mind of a master.

Most serious film lovers are familiar with Hitchcock/Truffaut, a book first published in France in 1967. The book offered a meticulously edited version of a week-long conversation between two very different directors, Alfred Hitchcock and Francois Truffaut.

In this essential volume, Hitchcock not only reveals his ideas about cinema, but engages in detailed discussions of how he achieved some of his most notable effects.

Unlike many books, Hitchcock/Truffaut can be opened almost anywhere and still yield abundant rewards. Credit Truffaut -- who began his career as a critic for the vaunted French publication Cahiers du Cinema. Truffaut venerated and understood Hitchcock, and was intimately familiar with his work.

Now comes director Kent Jones's documentary of the same name, another essential work that either will serve as a welcome amplification for devotees of the book or an introduction to it for cinema newbies.

Using segments of the recorded conversation between Hitchcock and Truffaut, well-selected clips from Hitchcock's films and commentary by a variety of current directors, Jones has assembled a film that deserves to become part of every film lovers collection.

Happily, those commenting on the films are not the usual suspects, aside from director Martin Scorsese, who always adds something valuable to any film about film in which he appears.

Jones also includes insights from other directors, notably James Gray, David Fincher, Richard Linklater, Wes Anderson, Olivier Assayas, Arnaud Desplechin, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Peter Bogdanovich and Paul Schrader.

Of course, few can do a better job of describing Hitchcock's work than Hitchcock himself, and he does so with the kind of candor and generosity that he might only have been able to achieve with another filmmaker.

At the time of the book's initial publication, Truffaut hoped that a comprehensive look at Hitchcock's work would help change the view that some held of the "master of suspense." Truffaut believed that in the U.S., Hitchcock was regarded as a talented entertainer who made commercially successful thrillers. No more.

That view seems remarkably dated now: Few knowledgeable filmgoers would dispute the inseparability of Hitchcock's visual and narrative mastery, and most of us are willing to acknowledge that art and commerce needn't be irreconcilable enemies.

It's encouraging to hear a new generation of filmmakers talk about what they learned from watching Hitchcock's movies. Gray marvels at the perverse genius of Vertigo, for example.

But perhaps the best thing about Hitchcock/Truffaut is that it reaffirms what it means to take a serious approach to film -- not pompous, overly academic or self-impressed, but one that delights in rich analysis and deep appreciation.

As a result, Hitchcock/Truffaut provides us with abundant and durable pleasures.