Lonely Men in Rooms
Reflections on Paul Schrader's Trilogy (& My Murakami article for Lithub)
What do Haruki Murakami and Paul Schrader have in common? Lonely men! And who doesn’t love a flick about a guy just being a guy all by himself? Apparently, if the BFI Directors’ 100 Greatest Films of All Time list is any arbiter of good taste, they’re often the best of the best. (Note: survey completed overwhelmingly by male directors.) Which brings me to the purpose of this post: I’m finally sharing an essay I wrote for LitHub last month about the recent Haruki Murakami adaptation Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman.
The piece is a survey of some recent Murakami adaptations I’ve loved and an assessment of their relative strengths and weaknesses when it comes to faithful translations of the author’s style to cinematic form. But, while I plug that, I should also plug a conversation between Mieko Kawakami and Murakami regarding the female characters in his work, which range from one dimensional vessels for an aimless male protagonist’s self-discovery (see: the librarian in Hardboiled Wonderland) to multi-dimensional badasses who drive the narrative momentum of Murakami’s work far more than their aimless male counterparts (see: Aomame in 1Q84).
I also want to (finally) share some reflections on that other practitioner of the lonely man genre, Paul Schrader, and his “Man in a Room” Trilogy… I think we need a SUPERTITLES moment for that though, so without further ado:
Reflections on Paul Schrader’s “Man in a Room” Trilogy
A few months ago, Paul Schrader closed out his “man in a room” trilogy with Master Gardener (2023). The moment Joel Edgerton appeared on screen (hunched over a desk, scribbling away in a journal to the rhythm of his accompanying voiceover track) my fellow theatergoers cheered with an enthusiasm usually reserved for superhero cameos, which gives some idea of the fandom Schrader’s late career work has inspired.1 But unlike the sequels of Kevin Feige’s Marvel bonanza extravaganza, Schrader’s are marked less by fan-service than present tense political concerns framed through a first person narrative style that harkens back to Robert Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest (1951). One could call it a thematic trilogy, in the vein of Bergman’s chamber dramas, wherein the genre constraints of Schrader’s “man in a room” allow him to explore bigger social issues through a style he’s mastered over the course of his near-fifty year career.
This time around the issue is white supremacy and the man in the room is horticulturalist Narvell Roth (Joel Edgerton) who oversees the garden estate of Norma Haverhill (Sigourney Weaver), a wealthy dowager with whom he has a not-so-platonic relationship. The central drama kicks off when Norma’s mixed-race grand niece, Maya (Quintessa Swindell) arrives at the estate to apprentice under Narvell. Norma prefaces Maya’s arrival with the fact that she dropped out of school after the death of her mother (Norma’s sister’s daughter) and fell in with a “bad crowd.” Her hope is that learning the art of gardening will have the same redemptive effect on her as it did Narvell. But when Narvell and Maya’s relationship evolves from mentorship to romance, Norma catches on and casts the two out of her garden estate like the Old Testament God, during which time Narvell and Maya go through their greatest trials yet: her recovering from drug addiction, him grappling with his white supremacist past.
It’s hard to critique the resolution to the film’s “Garden of Eden” revisionism without spoiling the rest of it,2 but let’s just say the way it handles white supremacist imagery gets a little dicey in the final half hour. Or am I being cynical about the rose-colored tint that coats the final entry in a trilogy otherwise marked by darkness and despair?
Part of the pleasure of watching a trilogy is picking up on similarities between the distinct works. Discovering those patterns can deepen one’s understanding of the greater artistic and intellectual concerns at play in the filmmaker’s vision. Which is to say, since the release of Master Gardener, one can no longer see The Card Counter (2021) or First Reformed (2017) without appealing to their successor. In a way Master Gardener focuses the point of view underlying the “man in a room” trilogy even as it deviates from its predecessors in interesting, if not always fruitful, ways.
For starters, there’s the obvious repetition of the “man in the room” conceit – sure – but dig a little deeper and we find several more overlaps. Consider:
Each protagonist has a profession that offers a metaphorical angle on their dark past, like in Card Counter when William Tell (Oscar Isaac) compares the debt he accrues through gambling in high stakes poker to the moral weight he has accrued through participation in war crimes at Abu Ghraib. (Also see: Reverend Toller (Ethan Hawke) contemplating his church’s enmeshment with the fossil fuel industry via scripture in First Reformed and Narvell’s “pull out the weeds” nightmare in Master Gardener.)
Each features a surreal intimacy sequence, as in First Reformed when Reverend Toller and his parishioner Mary (Amanda Seyfried) embrace and float over images of burning tires. (Also see: the dazzling hotel lights show in Card Counter and the nocturnal super bloom in Master Gardener.)
Each features a supporting character to whom the protagonist offers guidance via their area of expertise: Sirk (Tye Sheridan) in Card Counter, Mary in First Reformed, and Maya in Master Gardener.
Each ends with a climactic moment, in which the protagonist’s reflective mood spills over into violence.
Digging into any of these would better align one with Schrader’s artistic vision, but why bother doing all that work when the trilogy’s most potent commonality is apparent from a mere glance at the movie posters alone? Yes, Toller, Tell, and Narvell all have… the same haircut.
Perhaps that observation sounds a bit clickbait-y, but it seems notable that all these crewcuts (close shaved sides with gelled-back tops of, albeit, varying lengths) adorn the heads of the spiritual successors to Schrader’s original “man in a room,” Travis Bickel.
When one considers this pattern in the context of all the others, the otherwise dark and brooding aesthetic of First Reformed and Card Counter begins to feel a bit softer than it did the first time around. After all, both films end on images that contradict the violence and despair preceding them. In the former, immediately after wrapping his body in barbed wire, Toller sees Mary enter his rectory where the two immediately join lips in a surreal and rapturous embrace. In the latter, following his brutal act of murder and subsequent arrest, we end on Tell touching his finger to La Linda’s (Tiffany Haddish) on the opposite side of a prison glass wall.
These images aren’t merely hopeful. It’s more complicated than that (which is what we like about Schrader). But it’s hard not to see the optimism in them considering the context their narratives provide. Toller and Tell’s lives of asceticism and reflection have enabled them to process the moral matrix they find themselves caught up in and reconcile their past sins with action. As a result, they are met with a moment of grace in the end. Their arcs bend toward redemption, as if to suggest to the audience that, with enough honest reflection, they could do the same and take accountability for the impact of the greater systems they find themselves caught up in.
Compare this to Taxi Driver where the perverse cheerfulness of Travis Bickel’s ending suggests quite the opposite. The news reports covering his violent shootout turn him into a local hero because said actions result in the return of Iris (Jodie Foster) — a prostitute Travis meets earlier in the film — to her nuclear family unit. Those familiar with the film will recall his original plan to assassinate a local politician, a plan that preceded his opening fire on Iris’s pimps in a rundown apartment complex. Which is to say, his motives for the shootout were more reactionary than well-intentioned.
Thus, at its core Taxi Driver’s ending is cynical. In providing Bickel with a happy ending, Schrader spotlights the country’s puritanical foundations, revealing how said beliefs condone the violence of lonely white men like Travis: Schrader’s original white supremacist. As Travis says while gazing out the window of his cab, taking in the night life of midtown Manhattan, “Someday a real rain will come and wash all the scum off the streets.” (The rest of his monologue is tinged with the racist rhetoric of the times, even as he asserts his lack of discrimination “I go all over… Bronx… Brooklyn… Harlem… Don’t make no difference to me.”3)
Perhaps this is why, at the end of Taxi Driver, Bickel shaves a mohawk into his head: to indicate his radicalization. Meanwhile the middle aged men of Schrader’s Bressonian universe rarely let a hair out of place, even as they otherwise wreak havoc on their bodies: Toller poisoning his insides with alcohol, Tell voluntarily engaging in tit for tat torture combat, and Narvell covering his chest and back in neonazi imagery. Travis on the other hand obsesses over keeping himself in shape and building quick-draw gun appendages, weaponizing his body for the achievement of some inchoate goal. He seeks purpose through violence while Schrader’s late career protagonists merely seek penance for the sins they have already committed. They aren’t outwardly concerned with radicalism in any form, but they are inwardly concerned with the political present their actions have yielded and are seeking ways to alter its course.
Schrader’s admiration for his crewcut protagonists gets rounded out by the mentorship they offer the zoomers and millennials they take under their wings. These younger characters are both foils to the ascetic men and vessels into which said men pour all their hopes of a better future.4 It is Schrader’s way of asserting that, if Toller, Tell, and Narvell can take accountability for their role in certain American sins — climate change, Abu Ghraib, white supremacy — there is a possibility that progress will be made in the next generation. Otherwise, the Mayas, Marys, and Sirks of the world are at risk of losing hope and obsessing over revenge the same way Travis Bickel does.
On the off chance there are some Schrader fans who have yet to watch this one.
It’s similar to a comment Norma makes when discussing Maya’s Black father: “How she ended up with him… no accounting for people’s taste. It was ok with me, of course.” The offhand remark reveals an awareness that her plantation surroundings might suggest otherwise. Perhaps she has felt the need to get ahead of such presumptions in the past?
It’s amusing to imagine Reverend Toller building bombs alongside the young climate activists of How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2023), but isn’t that sort of what Schrader is rooting for by the end of this trilogy?