‘To Leave This World’ “离开这个世界”
Gabriel Winslow-Yost 加布里埃尔·温斯洛-约斯特
June 21, 2023 2023年6月21日
In his recent trilogy of films, Paul Schrader uses his signature device—a man in a room, arguing with himself—to study society’s sins. 在他最近的三部电影中，保罗·施雷德利用他的招牌手法——一个人在房间里与自己争论——来研究社会的罪恶。
Bonnie Marquette/Magnolia Pictures 邦妮·马凯特/玛格诺利亚影业
Joel Edgerton as Narvel and Quintessa Swindell as Maya in Paul Schrader’s Master Gardener, 2023 乔尔·埃格顿饰演纳维尔，昆蒂莎·斯温德尔饰演玛雅，在保罗·施雷德的《大师园丁》中，2023年
No one would call Paul Schrader an especially funny filmmaker, but he has made at least one truly hilarious movie: his contribution to Venice 70: Future Reloaded, an omnibus film created for the seventieth anniversary of the Venice Film Festival in 2013. Schrader’s entry is a ninety-second short, codirected with his former assistant Andrew Wonder, in which he strides down the High Line park in New York City while wearing a rickety, ludicrous rig of digital cameras. Three are on spindly arms mounted to a harness around his waist, and another protrudes off his neon green helmet; all four are pointed at his face. The film cuts frenetically from angle to angle as Schrader fumbles with his glasses, gulps water, huffs and puffs past confused pedestrians, and delivers a mini-lecture on the current state of the cinema. Movies are in “a crisis of form,” he declares. “We don’t know quite what movies are—we don’t know how long they are, we don’t know how you see them, where you see them, how you pay for them…. Every week brings another change.” 没有人会称保罗·斯克雷德尔是一个特别幽默的电影制片人，但他至少拍过一部真正搞笑的电影：他为2013年威尼斯电影节七十周年庆典创作的《威尼斯70：未来重装》中的一部分。斯克雷德尔的作品是一部九十秒的短片，与他的前助手安德鲁·温德共同执导，他在纽约市的高线公园中穿着一个摇摇欲坠、荒谬可笑的数字相机装置。其中三个相机安装在细长的臂膀上，固定在他的腰部挂带上，另一个从他的霓虹绿头盔上伸出；所有四个相机都对准他的脸。电影疯狂地从一个角度切换到另一个角度，斯克雷德尔摸不着头脑地摆弄眼镜，喝水，喘气，从困惑的行人身边走过，并发表了一段关于电影当前状态的迷你讲话。他宣称电影正处于“形式危机”中。“我们不知道电影到底是什么——我们不知道它们有多长，我们不知道如何观看它们，我们不知道在哪里观看它们，我们不知道如何为它们付费……每周都会带来新的变化。”
Schrader had always been an incongruous figure among his New Hollywood peers, the filmmakers who, starting in the late 1960s, made “about fifteen years of interesting films,” as he puts it in the Venice short. A film critic turned screenwriter turned writer-director, he was most famous for his scripts for other people’s movies—Martin Scorsese’s, most of all, including Taxi Driver (1976) and Raging Bull (1980), as well as Brian De Palma’s, Sydney Pollack’s, and more. Even as a director his work was defined more by a consistent, contradictory set of thematic fixations than by any particular visual style: a half-horrified fascination with sleaze and glamour and with violent, alienated men; narratives structured around spiritual sickness and the possibility of redemption, often with self-conscious borrowings from other films. His greatest work from this time was probably American Gigolo (1980), a film of glittering, seductive surfaces—it is often credited with popularizing the clothing of Giorgio Armani and making Richard Gere a sex symbol—that gets sadder and sadder as it goes. Its ending was lifted wholesale from Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket (1959): the protagonist in prison, suddenly expressing his love for the woman who visits him. 施拉德在新好莱坞同行中一直是一个不协调的人物，他们是从20世纪60年代末开始制作“大约十五年有趣的电影”的电影制片人，正如他在威尼斯短片中所说的那样。他是一位电影评论家转行成为编剧和导演的作家，他最著名的是为他人的电影编写剧本，尤其是马丁·斯科塞斯的电影，包括《出租车司机》（1976年）和《愤怒的公牛》（1980年），以及布莱恩·德帕尔玛、悉尼·波拉克等人的电影。即使作为导演，他的作品更多地被一系列一致而矛盾的主题固定所定义，而不是特定的视觉风格：对肮脏和魅力以及暴力、疏离男性的半惊恐的着迷；以精神疾病和救赎的可能性为结构的叙事，常常自觉地借鉴其他电影。他在这个时期最伟大的作品可能是《美国舞男》（1980年），这是一部闪耀迷人的电影，它常常被认为是流行起了乔治·阿玛尼的服装，并使理查德·基尔成为性感象征的电影，随着剧情的发展，它变得越来越悲伤。 它的结局完全借鉴了罗伯特·布雷松的《扒手》（1959）：主人公在监狱里，突然向探望他的女人表达了爱意。
Even well after the end of those fifteen golden years, Schrader managed to get odd, uneasy, fascinating films made. (The early-Nineties pair The Comfort of Strangers and Light Sleeper were especially pleasing, by which I mean quietly harrowing.) But by 2013 his movies did seem like the work of someone struggling—or perhaps flailing—against the shifting currents of his medium. The Canyons (2013), which starred Lindsay Lohan and James Deen, better known as a pornographic actor (and accused a few years later of a variety of sexual abuses), was notorious even before its release for its difficult, low-budget production. The film itself—a bleak erotic thriller set on the fringes of Hollywood, punctuated by photographs of abandoned, decrepit movie theaters—seems almost disgusted by its own existence, as if its dreary writing and stilted acting are meant to exemplify how far movies had fallen. 即使在那十五个辉煌年代结束后的很久以后，施拉德仍然设法拍摄出一些奇特、不安、迷人的电影。（早期的九十年代的作品《陌生人的安慰》和《浅眠者》尤其令人满意，我指的是那种悄然令人毛骨悚然的满足感。）但到了2013年，他的电影似乎像是一个人在努力，或者说是在挣扎，对抗着媒体的变化潮流。《峡谷》（2013年）由琳赛·罗韩和詹姆斯·迪恩主演，后者更为人所知的是一位色情演员（几年后被指控有各种性侵行为），在上映之前就因其困难的低预算制作而臭名昭著。这部电影本身是一部在好莱坞边缘设定的阴郁情色惊悚片，穿插着废弃、破败的电影院的照片，似乎对自己的存在感到厌恶，仿佛它沉闷的剧本和生硬的表演意在展示电影已经堕落到何种程度。
Dying of the Light (2014), a glum, drab spy story about a CIA agent suffering from dementia, was reedited and otherwise altered by its producers during postproduction. Schrader eventually responded by releasing an unauthorized director’s cut cobbled together using DVDs of rough drafts of the movie. This version, titled Dark, is twenty minutes shorter, with an “aggressive editing style” meant to mirror the main character’s mental decline: with its jagged cuts and low-res zooms, the film seems to be tearing itself apart as you try to watch it. The scuzzy Dog Eat Dog (2016) was more conventionally satisfying, though that’s a very low bar: its gleefully incoherent mix of comedy and cruelty is at its best in the supporting performance by Willem Dafoe as a hoodlum who chatters endlessly in earnest self-help lingo while committing atrocious acts of violence. It might have seemed like this late phase of Schrader’s long career was following a recognizable arc: he was learning at least to enjoy the chaos of twenty-first-century filmmaking, if not to control it. 《光之死》（2014年）是一部沉闷、单调的间谍故事，讲述了一位患有痴呆症的中情局特工。在后期制作期间，制片方对电影进行了重新剪辑和其他修改。施拉德尔最终以未经授权的导演剪辑版发布了《黑暗》这个版本，该版本使用了电影初稿的DVD拼凑而成。这个版本比原版短了二十分钟，采用了“激进的剪辑风格”，旨在反映主角的精神衰退：电影的剪辑切换和低分辨率的放大镜效果让人感觉电影正在自我撕裂，观看起来非常困难。《狗咬狗》（2016年）则更加传统而令人满意，尽管这个标准很低：它充满了令人愉快的混乱，将喜剧和残忍混合在一起，其中威廉·达福饰演的恶棍表演是最出色的，他一边不停地用认真的自助语言唠叨，一边犯下可怕的暴力行为。施拉德尔晚年的电影生涯似乎遵循着一个可辨识的轨迹：他至少学会了享受21世纪电影制作的混乱，即使无法掌控它。
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All of which made the release of First Reformed the next year a genuine shock, like a sudden, ominous stillness in the middle of a storm. From its opening shot—a slow dolly toward an old white wooden church building, as night gives way to day—it announces itself as an entirely different sort of movie. The story of a lonely, grieving minister (Ethan Hawke) giving in to despair over the destruction of the environment is told with a carefully restrained style: long takes, little music, almost no camera movement, most of the action limited to quiet conversations. “The world is changing so fast—and right in front of us,” an anguished young parishioner tells the priest, and of course he means global warming and mass extinction, not the coming of digital projection. The crisis of cinema has been overtaken by a crisis of far greater significance. 所有这一切都使得《第一改革教堂》在接下来的一年里成为一个真正的震撼，就像风暴中突然出现的一片沉寂的黑暗。从它的开场镜头——一个缓慢推进的镜头，朝着一座古老的白色木制教堂建筑，夜晚逐渐转为白昼——它宣告自己是一部完全不同类型的电影。这是一个关于一个孤独、悲伤的牧师（伊桑·霍克饰）因为环境破坏而陷入绝望的故事，以一种谨慎克制的风格来讲述：长镜头、少音乐、几乎没有摄像机移动，大部分动作都限制在安静的对话中。“世界变化得如此之快——就在我们面前”，一个痛苦的年轻教友告诉牧师，当然他指的是全球变暖和物种灭绝，而不是数字投影的到来。电影的危机已经被一场更为重大的危机所取代。
The result was the best film of Schrader’s career. It is also, he has said, “a movie I always didn’t want to make,” the sort of story he’d been running away from ever since he’d abandoned his Calvinist upbringing for Hollywood: austere, minimalist, openly spiritual. And yet it was a film he was always on the verge of making. Like much of his best work—Light Sleeper, American Gigolo, Taxi Driver—it was written under the sign of Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest (1951), structured around a solitary man writing down his thoughts, trying and failing to hold himself together. Schrader has called this trope “God’s lonely man” or, more modestly, “the man in the room.” 结果是Schrader职业生涯中最好的电影。他曾说过，这也是一部“我一直不想拍的电影”，这种故事是他自从离开加尔文主义的家庭来到好莱坞以来一直在逃避的类型：朴素、极简、公开表达宗教信仰。然而，这是一部他一直想要拍摄的电影。就像他的许多杰作——《浅眠者》、《美国舞男》、《出租车司机》——都是在布雷松的《乡村牧师日记》（1951）的影响下创作的，围绕着一个孤独的人记录自己的思想，试图保持自我却屡屡失败。Schrader称这个主题为“上帝的孤独之人”，或者更谦虚地说，“房间里的人”。
In his earlier films the deranged worlds his men saw around them were expressions not of reality but of their own derangement: Travis Bickle’s “open sewer” New York, Julian Kaye’s loveless LA in American Gigolo. In First Reformed, that internal sickness finds its equal in the world. Father Toller is sick at heart and in body, and his mind slips more and more as the movie progresses—but the sickness he sees in the world is real, and agonizing. We see it too, all around us, every day. We breathe its smoke, feel its heat, count its dead. As Toller tells Mary, the wife of his anguished parishioner, after her husband has blown his head off with a shotgun: “Michael was troubled but his cause was just.” The justice and the trouble: the film holds them up together, shows us Toller trying to tease them apart, to keep his eyes on the true cause as his troubles grow, and shows him failing. 在他早期的电影中，男主角所看到的疯狂世界并不是现实的表达，而是他们自己的错乱：特拉维斯·比克尔所看到的“开放下水道”纽约，朱利安·凯在《美国娇客》中所经历的无爱洛杉矶。在《初悔》中，这种内在的病态在世界中找到了它的对等。托勒神父心灵和身体都病入膏肓，电影的进展中他的思维越来越混乱，但他所看到的世界的病态是真实而痛苦的。我们也看到了，它无处不在，每天都围绕着我们。我们呼吸着它的烟雾，感受着它的炙热，数着它的死亡。正如托勒对他痛苦的教区会员的妻子玛丽所说，在她丈夫用霰弹枪自杀后：“迈克尔困扰着，但他的事业是正义的。”正义和困扰：电影将它们并列，向我们展示托勒试图将它们分开，将目光集中在真正的事业上，但随着他的困扰增加，他却失败了。
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Ethan Hawke as Toller and Amanda Seyfried as Mary on the set of Paul Schrader’s First Reformed, New York, 2016 伊桑·霍克饰演托勒，阿曼达·塞弗里德饰演玛丽，拍摄于2016年，保罗·施雷德导演的《第一改革教堂》，纽约
Some viewers, especially those who come to it already deeply engaged with the problem of global warming, have seen First Reformed as unnecessarily—or perhaps counterproductively—morbid. Daniel Goldhaber, the director of this year’s stirring eco-terrorist heist movie How to Blow Up a Pipeline, has said that he “loved” Schrader’s film, but used it as an example of “things we did not want to do” because it failed to represent the current situation as anything other than “a tragedy. It can’t imagine climate resistance as something more than an extension of, like, toxic masculinity.” 一些观众，尤其是那些已经深入参与全球变暖问题的人，认为《第一改革》过于阴郁，甚至可能适得其反。今年备受瞩目的生态恐怖主义抢劫电影《如何炸毁一条管道》的导演丹尼尔·戈尔德哈伯表示他“喜欢”施拉德的电影，但将其作为“我们不想做的事情”的一个例子，因为它未能将当前的情况呈现为“一场悲剧以外的其他事物。它无法将气候抵抗想象成超越有毒男性气质的延伸。”
Others don’t think it’s even really about the environment at all. The critic Masha Tupitsyn, in her introduction to the published version of First Reformed’s screenplay, writes that “a film critic friend” told her that “Schrader doesn’t care about planetary apocalypse. It’s just a MacGuffin.” She ends up more or less agreeing: “The environmental catastrophe that is supposedly at the center of First Reformed is a plot mechanism for Schrader’s ongoing transcendental themes.” 其他人认为这根本就不是关于环境的问题。评论家玛莎·图皮茨因在《第一改革教堂》剧本出版版的引言中写道，“一位电影评论家朋友”告诉她，“施拉德并不关心地球末日，这只是一个噱头。”她最终或多或少地同意了这种观点：“《第一改革教堂》所谓的环境灾难只是施拉德持续超验主题的情节机制。”
There is something to this. Schrader followed First Reformed with two more films in the same mode, though neither is quite as stylistically restrained. Each focuses on a lone, furiously journaling man struggling with guilt over a vast societal wrong and sliding toward violence. In The Card Counter (2021) that wrong is the so-called war on terror, specifically the abuses at Abu Ghraib; in his newest film, Master Gardner, it is white supremacy. This loose trilogy could be seen as a series of mashups, in which Schrader’s “man in a room” meets selected objects of liberal doomscrolling outrage (and Schrader does have a vociferous social media presence, to put it gently). 这个有点意思。施拉德尔在《第一改革会堂》之后又拍摄了两部风格相似的电影，尽管两部电影在风格上都没有那么克制。每部电影都聚焦于一个孤独而愤怒地记录日志的男人，他为了一种巨大的社会错误而感到内疚，并逐渐滑向暴力。在《赌牌高手》（2021年）中，这个错误是所谓的反恐战争，具体来说是阿布格莱布的虐待行为；在他最新的电影《大师园丁》中，这个错误是白人至上主义。这个宽泛的三部曲可以被看作是一系列混搭作品，施拉德尔的“一个房间里的人”与自由主义者愤怒的网络滚动中选定的对象相遇（施拉德尔在社交媒体上也有着激烈的存在，姑且这么说）。
But one might just as easily see the reverse. Schrader has repeated his “man in a room” schema so many times that I’m not sure it really functions as subject matter anymore. It feels instead like a kind of method, a way of using cinema to look outward at the world and think it through. The lonely man is a device that allows Schrader to take on subjects that might otherwise be too big to approach, too urgent, unwieldy, or impersonal. It becomes an acid in which these problems can be dissolved, so we can study their bones. 但同样可以看到相反的情况。Schrader已经多次重复他的“一个房间里的人”模式，以至于我不确定它是否真的作为主题仍然有效。它更像是一种方法，一种用电影来向外看世界并思考的方式。这个孤独的人是一个工具，让Schrader能够处理那些可能太大、太紧迫、难以控制或者太冷漠的主题。它成为了一种溶解这些问题的酸，这样我们就可以研究它们的本质。
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Part of the power of this trio of films—and they are undeniably powerful—comes from this use of filmmaking as a mode of contemplation: sustained but not static, rigorous but not bloodless, ever-changing but never quite resolving. The Card Counter is in many ways a logical progression from First Reformed. The Iraq War lurks in the background as the reason for Toller’s loneliness: his son was killed in that “war that had no moral justification,” as Toller puts it, just six months after enlisting with Toller’s encouragement. His wife, who opposed their son’s enlistment, has left him. In The Card Counter we gradually learn that the titular gambler, who now goes by William Tell, is an ex-soldier who was court martialed and imprisoned for participating in the abuses at Abu Ghraib—an imaginary member of the tiny cohort of low-level soldiers who were actually punished for those crimes. 这三部电影的力量之一——它们无可否认地强大——来自于将电影制作作为一种思考方式的运用：持久而不静态，严谨而不冷血，不断变化但从未完全解决。《牌手》在很多方面都是《初悔》的一个合乎逻辑的延伸。伊拉克战争潜伏在背景中，成为托勒孤独的原因：他的儿子在托勒鼓励下入伍仅六个月后在那场“没有道义正当性”的战争中丧生。他的妻子反对儿子入伍，离开了他。在《牌手》中，我们逐渐了解到这位名为威廉·泰尔的赌徒实际上是一名前士兵，因参与阿布格莱布虐待案件而受到军事法庭审判和监禁——他是那些实际上受到惩罚的低级士兵中的一个虚构成员。
Oscar Isaac plays him as a man of terrifyingly rigid control, so disgusted by what he has seen and done that he can hardly bear to touch the world. He moves through an endless deadening series of casino floors, conference rooms, and hotels. (Where First Reformed was about the degradation of nature, in The Card Counter nature is almost completely absent.) Every night before he sleeps he removes all the pictures from the walls of his room and wraps all the furniture in white sheets, converting the space into a kind of blank purgatory: a visual metaphor for the despair around which the film revolves. 奥斯卡·伊萨克饰演的角色展现出一种令人恐惧的严格控制力，他对自己所见所做感到厌恶，几乎无法触碰这个世界。他穿越无尽的、令人麻木的赌场、会议室和酒店。《第一教区》讲述了自然的堕落，而在《赌牌高手》中，自然几乎完全缺失。每天晚上睡觉前，他会把房间墙上的所有照片都拿下来，用白色床单包裹所有家具，将空间转化为一种空白的炼狱：这是影片围绕的绝望的视觉隐喻。
Both First Reformed and The Card Counter use black characters as foils for their protagonists. In First Reformed it is Reverend Jeffers, the charismatic, entrepreneurial head of the Abundant Life Church, of which Toller’s First Reformed is an antiquated subsidiary. Jeffers chastises Toller for his rigidity and morbidity—for being “always in the garden,” as he puts it—and in a simpler film he might seem no more than a sellout, tempting Toller away from moral seriousness. Instead, what he is advising is a greater engagement with the world, in which compromise goes hand in hand with service to others and kindness to oneself. 《First Reformed》和《The Card Counter》都使用黑色角色作为他们的主角的衬托。在《First Reformed》中，这个角色是杰弗斯牧师，他是富有魅力和企业家精神的丰盛生命教会的负责人，而托勒的First Reformed只是这个过时附属教会的一部分。杰弗斯批评托勒的僵化和病态，他说托勒“总是在花园里”，在一个简单的电影中，他可能只是一个出卖原则的人，试图引诱托勒远离道德的严肃性。然而，他所建议的是更加积极地参与世界，妥协与为他人服务和善待自己是相辅相成的。
Focus Features 聚焦影业
Oscar Isaac as William Tell and Tiffany Haddish as La Linda in Paul Schrader’s The Card Counter, 2021 奥斯卡·伊萨克饰演威廉·泰尔，蒂凡尼·哈迪什饰演拉琳达，出演保罗·施雷德的电影《赌牌高手》，2021年
In The Card Counter this figure is La Linda, who manages a stable of card players and encourages Tell to switch from his careful blackjack to riskier, more remunerative high-stakes poker. He eventually does, and the two enter into a tentative romance. Somewhat like Jeffers, what she offers is a mix of love and capitalism, an ambiguous worldliness. And, like Jeffers, who is played by Cedric “The Entertainer” Kyles, she is played by a very successful black comedian: Tiffany Haddish. 在《赌牌高手》中，这个角色是拉琳达，她管理着一群赌牌玩家，并鼓励特尔从小心谨慎的二十一点转向更冒险、更有报酬的高额扑克。最终，他接受了她的建议，两人开始了一段试探性的浪漫关系。有点像杰弗斯一样，她所提供的是爱情和资本主义的混合，一种模糊的世故。而且，就像由塞德里克“娱乐家”凯尔斯扮演的杰弗斯一样，她也由非常成功的黑人喜剧演员蒂凡尼·哈迪什扮演。
Schrader used a similar casting maneuver in his directorial debut, Blue Collar (1978), pitting the Method intensity of Harvey Keitel against the improvisatory talent of Richard Pryor. There the contrast was deliberately explosive, as Keitel and Pryor’s characters go from mismatched union buddies to co-conspirators in a burglary to bitter enemies; the film famously ends with a vicious, epithet-filled fight between them. In First Reformed and The Card Counter the contrast is more muted. Kyles and Haddish give warm, casually commanding performances, and both characters feel natural in their respective films, but they sit a little less easily when considered together. There seems to be some argument lurking in the subtext—or perhaps simply a set of assumptions—but it’s hard to make it out. Schrader在他的导演处女作《蓝领》（1978）中使用了类似的演员选择策略，将哈维·凯特尔的方法演技与理查德·普莱尔的即兴才华相对比。在那里，对比是故意制造的爆炸性的，因为凯特尔和普莱尔的角色从不搭调的工会伙伴变成了共同犯罪的同谋，最终成为了彼此之间的敌人；这部电影以他们之间恶毒、充满侮辱性的打斗而闻名。在《First Reformed》和《The Card Counter》中，对比更加缓和。凯尔斯和哈迪什都表现出温暖、自然的演出，两个角色在各自的电影中都感觉很自然，但是当把它们放在一起考虑时，它们似乎不太协调。在潜台词中似乎有一些争论，或者只是一些假设，但很难理解清楚。
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Master Gardener makes race the center of the text. The man in the room this time is Narvel Roth, the live-in head gardener of an elaborate southern estate called Gracewood Gardens: a man who tells his journal things like “gardening is a belief in the future. A belief that things will happen according to plan,” and “the seeds of love grow like the seeds of hate.” We soon learn that he is also a former member of a violent white supremacist gang—flashbacks intrude periodically, and we get a look at his torso, covered in neo-Nazi tattoos. It seems clear that this will be an attempt to treat America’s legacy of racist violence using the same contemplative devices as the previous films: lonely agony, fitful engagements with a few representatives of the wider world, a slow build to violent rupture. All the more so when the plot gets going and Norma, Gracewood Gardens’ owner, asks Narvel to take on her twentysomething mixed-race (or “mixed blood,” as Norma puts it) grandniece as an apprentice. 大师园丁将种族置于文本的中心。这次房间里的男人是纳维尔·罗斯，他是一个名叫格雷斯伍德花园的南方庄园的住家园丁：一个告诉他的日记“园艺是对未来的信仰。相信事情会按计划发生”的人，以及“爱的种子就像仇恨的种子一样生长”。我们很快了解到他曾是一个暴力的白人至上主义团伙的成员——闪回不时闯入，我们看到他的躯干上布满了新纳粹纹身。很明显，这将是一次试图以同样的思考方式来处理美国种族主义暴力遗产的尝试：孤独的痛苦，与更广泛世界的少数代表的断断续续的接触，以及缓慢地建立起的暴力爆发。当情节展开并且诺玛，格雷斯伍德花园的主人，要求纳维尔接纳她二十多岁的混血（或者诺玛所说的“混血”）外甥女作为学徒时，这一切变得更加明朗。
This time, though, the mechanism begins to break down almost as soon as it starts up. Master Gardener is a strange, contradictory film—less coherent than its predecessors, and less convincing. (Alex Abramovich reported in The New Yorker that, after a screening of an early cut of the film, Schrader asked a friend, “How much trouble am I in?”) Its storytelling is oddly impatient. The flashbacks to Narvel’s violent past are abrupt and didactic. Previous films used a range of acting styles: The Card Counter sets up a productive clash not only between Isaac and Haddish but also between them and Tye Sheridan’s mumbly, recessive performance as a young man Tell tries to protect and Willem Dafoe’s more expansive, theatrical portrayal of the retired officer they eventually confront. But in Master Gardner the mismatch goes deeper. 这一次，然而，机制几乎在启动后立即开始崩溃。《大师园丁》是一部奇怪而矛盾的电影，比之前的作品更不连贯，也不够令人信服。（据《纽约客》的亚历克斯·阿布拉莫维奇报道，施拉德在一次早期剪辑版的放映后问一个朋友：“我有多大麻烦？”）它的叙事奇怪地不耐烦。纳维尔暴力过去的闪回突兀而教条。之前的电影使用了各种表演风格：《赌牌高手》不仅在艾萨克和哈迪什之间建立了一场富有成效的冲突，还在他们和泰·谢里丹的含糊不清、内向的表演之间，以及威廉·达福的更加宽广、戏剧化的表演与他们最终对抗的退休军官形成了对比。但在《大师园丁》中，这种不匹配更加深入。
Several of the main characters seem like different people than the story seems to be telling us they are. Narvel, played by Joel Edgerton, looks more fascistic after his reformation than he does in the past: he is shaggy and unkempt in flashback but now sports a side-slicked undercut and a wardrobe of almost fetishistically antiquated work clothes. And yet Edgerton gives him a courtly gentleness that makes it hard to imagine how he ever got all those tattoos; he feels neither like someone who consciously rejected neo-Nazism nor like someone who could ever really have been tempted by it. The flashbacks are too thin and brief to convince us otherwise. The film, like its predecessors, is structured around his agonizing, but his chief quality, past and present, seems instead a sort of baffled dutifulness. 一些主要角色似乎与故事所描绘的他们不同。乔尔·埃哲顿饰演的纳维尔在改过自新后看起来更加法西斯主义，而不是过去的样子：回忆中他头发蓬乱、不整洁，而现在则梳着一款侧分的底剃发型，穿着几乎像是古旧工作服的时尚。然而，埃哲顿赋予他一种彬彬有礼的温柔，让人难以想象他是如何纹了那些纹身的；他既不像是有意识地抵制新纳粹主义的人，也不像是曾经真正受到诱惑的人。回忆片段太过稀疏和短暂，无法让我们相信其他情况。这部电影，就像前作一样，围绕着他的痛苦展开，但他的主要特质，无论过去还是现在，似乎更像是一种困惑的责任感。
His young apprentice, Maya, is ostensibly a drug addict, periodically abused by a dealer for whom she sometimes works, but the film shows us someone else: a grounded, untroubled young woman, played by Quintessa Swindell with a mix of amusement and wary intelligence. The scenes in which she shows up to the garden with a bruised face or, later, in which she and Narvel confront the dealer and his cronies are among the most schematic and underdeveloped in the film. It’s the parts that don’t fit that feel the most alive: Edgerton’s and Swindell’s performances are vivid and complex, more convincing than the plot to which they are affixed. 他的年轻学徒玛雅表面上是个吸毒者，定期受到一个经常让她工作的贩毒者的虐待，但电影向我们展示了另一个人：一个脚踏实地、心境平和的年轻女性，由昆蒂莎·斯温德尔以一种混合了娱乐和警惕智慧的方式扮演。她带着青肿的脸出现在花园里的场景，或者后来她和纳维尔面对贩毒者及其手下的场景，在电影中是最为模式化和未充分发展的。那些不合时宜的部分才是最有生气的：埃奇顿和斯温德尔的表演生动而复杂，比他们所附着的情节更具说服力。
Narvel and Maya are attracted to each other—an attraction complicated not just by the disparity of their ages, her position as his employee, and Narvel’s past, but also by the fact that Narvel is in a long-running sexual relationship with Maya’s great-aunt Norma. Sigourney Weaver’s performance as Norma is the most harmonious in the film: she is imperious, touchy, and affectionate without ever seeming the least bit maternal, a woman who gives orders so easily it can seem like elegance, until she’s disobeyed. She calls Narvel “sweet pea” and summons him periodically for dinner and sex. Narvel和Maya彼此被吸引着，这种吸引力并不仅仅因为他们年龄的差异、她作为他的雇员的身份以及Narvel的过去而变得复杂，还因为Narvel与Maya的姑姑Norma保持着长期的性关系。Sigourney Weaver在Norma的角色中的表演是整部电影中最和谐的：她威严、易怒、亲切，但从未显得丝毫母性，她轻而易举地下命令，以至于看起来像是优雅，直到有人违抗她的命令。她称呼Narvel为“甜心”，定期召唤他共进晚餐并发生性关系。
Even before it’s quite begun, Narvel and Maya’s affair gets them fired and kicked out of Gracewood. Narvel threatens her dealers and in response they vandalize the gardens. (For a pair of small-time crooks, they do a surprisingly thorough job.) All of this feels artificial, a little arbitrary. The film’s emotional energy seems most invested not in any of the movements of the plot but in a single image, repeated throughout: Narvel’s bare body. 尽管还没有真正开始，纳维尔和玛雅的恋情却让他们被解雇并被赶出了格雷斯伍德。纳维尔威胁她的交易商，作为回应，他们破坏了花园。（对于一对小骗子来说，他们做得出奇地彻底。）所有这一切都感觉很不真实，有点随意。电影的情感能量似乎最投入的不是情节的任何动作，而是一个反复出现的形象：纳维尔赤裸的身体。
None of the main characters can look away. Narvel stares at himself in the mirror after undressing; we learn that he has declined to get any of the tattoos removed, long after he has renounced their meaning. Norma demands he undress in front of her, and her eyes linger on his torso with an obscure hunger: “Let me see you.” After he and Maya leave Gracewood together, he lets her catch a glimpse of his tattoos as a way of telling her about his past, and perhaps a preliminary form of seduction. “I thought you should know I was once someone else,” he tells her. Later, before they sleep together for the first time, she instructs him to take off his clothes and turn around so she can see the swastikas and other symbols on his back. She makes him promise to have the tattoos removed, but the exchange feels obligatory. More important is the long, slow survey that precedes it. For her, as for Norma and Narvel himself—and for Schrader, it would seem—this body is irresistible, an unanswered question about the erotic power of sin and hate. 主要角色都无法移开视线。纳维尔脱衣后在镜子前凝视着自己；我们得知他拒绝去除任何纹身，尽管他早已放弃了它们的意义。诺玛要求他在她面前脱衣，她的目光在他的躯体上停留，带着一种隐晦的渴望：“让我看看你。”在他和玛雅一起离开格雷斯伍德之后，他让她瞥见他的纹身，作为向她讲述他过去的一种方式，也许是一种初步的诱惑。“我想你应该知道，我曾经是另一个人，”他告诉她。稍后，当他们第一次发生关系之前，她指示他脱掉衣服，转过身来，这样她就可以看到他背上的纳粹十字和其他符号。她让他答应去除纹身，但这个交换似乎是义务性的。更重要的是它之前的长时间、缓慢的审视。对于她、诺玛和纳维尔自己，以及施拉德来说，这个身体是无法抗拒的，是关于罪恶和仇恨的情欲力量的一个未解之谜。
Magnolia Pictures 万达影业
Quintessa Swindell as Maya and Joel Edgerton as Narvel in Paul Schrader’s Master Gardener, 2023 2023年，保罗·斯克雷德执导的《园艺大师》中，Quintessa Swindell饰演Maya，Joel Edgerton饰演Narvel
The violence in the final act is perfunctory, gratuitous not because it is particularly explicit but because it seems so taken for granted that this is where the story should go. “You wanted them dead, now here they are,” Narvel tells Maya, holding her erstwhile dealers at gunpoint—though there’s been no particular indication before this that she did, in fact, want them dead, and these men seem more scummy than evil. She takes the gun, thinks it over, then spares them, so Narvel breaks their kneecaps with a hammer. 最后一幕中的暴力行为显得敷衍了事，毫无意义，不是因为它特别明确，而是因为人们似乎默认这就是故事的发展方向。“你想让他们死，现在他们就在这里了，”纳维尔指着那些曾经是玛雅的毒贩，用枪指着他们——尽管在此之前并没有明确表明她确实想让他们死，而这些人似乎更多是卑鄙而不是邪恶。她接过枪，思考片刻，然后放过了他们，于是纳维尔用锤子打碎了他们的膝盖。
Strengthened, somehow, by this encounter, they return to Gracewood Gardens, and Narvel tells Norma that he and Maya will live in his cabin on the estate “as husband and wife.” “That is…obscene,” Norma chokes out. (Narvel is a couple decades older than Maya, though Norma, in turn, is a couple decades older than him.) “No it’s not,” Narvel replies. “I’ve seen obscene.” As he returns to Maya, the film’s soundtrack for the first time features a human voice—until this point it’s been a synth-heavy instrumental score by Devonté Hynes, also known as Blood Orange. Now we hear the R&B singer Mereba performing a song called “Space and Time.” Narvel and Maya dance on the porch of his cabin, slow and gentle, as the camera pulls away and the credits roll. “I never want to leave this world,” Mereba sings, “without saying I love you.” 在这次相遇后，他们以某种方式变得更加坚定，回到了Gracewood花园。纳维尔告诉诺玛，他和玛雅将在庄园的小屋里“以夫妻的身份”生活。“那…太下流了，”诺玛咽了口气。（纳维尔比玛雅大几十岁，而诺玛比他又大几十岁。）“不，不下流，”纳维尔回答道。“我见过下流的事。”当他回到玛雅身边时，电影的配乐第一次出现了人声——此前一直是由Devonté Hynes（也被称为Blood Orange）创作的合成器重音乐。现在我们听到了R&B歌手Mereba演唱的一首名为“Space and Time”的歌曲。纳维尔和玛雅在他的小屋门廊上慢慢地舞动，镜头拉远，字幕滚动。“我永远不想离开这个世界，”Mereba唱道，“没有说出我爱你。”
What’s especially troubling about this ending is how sweet and perfect the moment is: a beautiful song, a beautiful shot, Narvel and Maya the picture of domestic bliss. Yet it does nothing to resolve the contradictions of what has come before, or only does so in ways one is reluctant to accept. From one angle, the movie seems to be proposing a kind of pan-racial fascism: a healing through violence that unites the generations, and extends even to a white supremacist and a black woman. Master Gardener would then belong alongside David Mamet’s Redbelt (2008) and Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino (2008): creaky, objectionable, occasionally stirring late-career odes to the balm of beating people up. Or maybe it is simply a petering out of inspiration and energy, the rogue wave that began with First Reformed finally crashing into the rocks. 这个结局特别令人困扰的地方在于，这一刻是如此甜蜜和完美：一首美妙的歌曲，一个美丽的镜头，纳维尔和玛雅成为了家庭幸福的典范。然而，它对之前发生的矛盾毫无作用，或者只是以一种令人不愿接受的方式解决了这些矛盾。从某个角度来看，这部电影似乎在提出一种全人种的法西斯主义：通过暴力实现世代团结，甚至包括一个白人至上主义者和一个黑人女性。《园艺大师》可能与大卫·马梅特的《红带》（2008年）和克林特·伊斯特伍德的《老爷车》（2008年）并列：老旧、令人反感，偶尔激发人心的晚年颂歌，歌颂了通过打人来治愈心灵的功效。或者也许它只是灵感和能量的消退，始于《初悔》的巨浪最终冲向了礁石。
From another angle, though, it appears not really to be about race at all—though it clearly thinks it is. Much of it, instead, seems to be about men and women and the power they have over each other. (“I’ve never thought too much about women, other than as women,” Narvel declares early on: not the most baffling line in the movie, but close.) Its central relationships are troubling and uncomfortable, deformed by age gaps and power relations; and yet both are tender and, in their way, genuinely affectionate. The performances, especially, bring them into truth. It is as if Schrader is pushing as hard as he can at the boundaries of acceptable onscreen love affairs, as a way to isolate the love. The repeated scenes of eroticized gazing at Narvel’s body may not really be about his racist past; the tattoos might be an excuse for that gaze rather than its object, a way to smuggle it into the macho mechanisms of a Schrader film. Narvel, in staring at his own body, could be imagining what it would be like to desire a man like himself: pondering the mystery not of his capacity for hate but of his capacity to be loved. 从另一个角度来看，尽管如此，它似乎并不完全是关于种族问题，尽管它明显认为是。相反，它更多地涉及男人和女人以及他们彼此之间的权力。 （“除了作为女人，我从来没有过多地思考过女人，”纳维尔在早期宣称：这并不是电影中最令人困惑的台词，但非常接近。）它的核心关系令人不安和不舒服，被年龄差距和权力关系所扭曲；然而，两者都是温柔的，并以自己的方式真挚地亲切。特别是表演将它们带入了真实。就像施拉德（Schrader）尽力推动可接受的银幕恋情的边界一样，以此来孤立这种爱。对纳维尔身体的情色凝视的重复场景可能并不真正涉及他的种族主义过去；纹身可能只是这种凝视的借口，而不是它的对象，一种将其偷偷带入施拉德电影男子气概机制的方式。纳维尔盯着自己的身体，可能在想象自己会如何渴望一个像他自己这样的男人：思考的不是他对恨的能力，而是他被爱的能力的神秘。
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Sin is a way to understand how our individual actions could possibly matter to something infinitely bigger than us, and in First Reformed it becomes a way to grasp at the strange enormity of global warming—how it permeates the most mundane moments of our lives yet can seem too vast to have any hope of addressing. The sins at the center of The Card Counter and Master Gardener are more personal to the men who committed them, but not entirely—they seep out, and spread. William Tell has deadened himself to the world and the world around him seems half-dead, a purgatory of airless, anonymous spaces and empty activity. In Master Gardener the symbolism is even more direct: a garden, Gracewood, is ruined (the vandals even spraypaint swastikas inside Narvel’s cabin, though they have no way of knowing about his past). 罪孽是一种理解我们个人行为如何可能对比我们更大的事物产生影响的方式，在《第一改革》中，它成为了理解全球变暖这种奇异巨大的方式——它渗透到我们生活中最平凡的时刻，却又似乎太过庞大，无法寄予希望。《赌牌高手》和《园艺大师》中的罪孽对犯下罪行的男人来说更加个人化，但并非完全如此——它们渗透出来，蔓延开来。威廉·泰尔已经对世界麻木了，而他周围的世界似乎也半死不活，成为了一个没有空气、没有名字的空间和空洞的活动的炼狱。在《园艺大师》中，象征意义甚至更加直接：一个名为格雷斯伍德的花园被毁了（破坏者甚至在纳维尔的小屋内喷涂纳粹标志，尽管他们不可能知道他的过去）。
Toller and Tell end up suspended between grace and damnation. Schrader has said that he left the ending of First Reformed intentionally ambiguous, and in The Card Counter he returns again to the paradoxical final shot of Pickpocket, with his protagonist newly imprisoned yet newly free. In Master Gardener he reaches for something else, for a picture of true absolution and peace. The ending is unsatisfying because it is so clearly unearned, so inadequate to the questions the film has asked. But the desire to end this way, with this moment, is affecting nonetheless. 《托勒和特尔》最终陷入了恩典与诅咒之间的悬疑状态。施拉德尔曾表示，他故意让《初恋的教堂》的结局模棱两可，而在《赌徒》中，他再次回到了《扒手》中矛盾的最后一镜头，他的主人公虽然被新囚禁，却也是新自由。在《园艺大师》中，他追求的是另一种东西，追求真正的赦免和和平的画面。结局令人不满，因为它显然是不应得的，对电影所提出的问题来说是不足的。但是，以这种方式结束，以这一刻结束的愿望仍然是感人的。
It’s an odd, fucked-up film that wants, deep down, to be a love story. We all want to wind up like Narvel: accepted, embraced, whether we’ve earned it or not. “Can God forgive us?” Michael asked Toller in First Reformed. Now Schrader has tried to imagine that someone, at least, can. 这是一部奇怪而扭曲的电影，它内心深处渴望成为一个爱情故事。我们都希望像纳维尔一样，被接纳、被拥抱，无论我们是否值得。迈克尔在《第一教区》中问托勒：“上帝能原谅我们吗？”现在，施拉德试图想象至少有一个人可以。
Master Gardener is now showing in theaters and available on demand. The screenplay for First Reformed is published by Archway Editions.
Gabriel Winslow-Yost 加布里埃尔·温斯洛-约斯特
Gabriel Winslow-Yost is on the editorial staff of The New York Review. (June 2023) 加布里埃尔·温斯洛-约斯特是《纽约评论》的编辑部成员。（2023年6月）