November 30th, 2015 - The Gardener (1974)

Oof. The Gardener is bad. And not in a fun way. Check out this plot - it's literally the best I could find from a half-dozen sites, and it's still bad: A strange man grows odd plants for a wealthy American woman in South America. The plants begin to emit deadly fumes! It seems that all of his previous employers have died mysteriously. What happens to him in the end is very bizarre. (Thanks terribly written Amazon plot summary!) Usually, with a plot like that, you can bank on some enjoyable weirdness or at least some entertaining surreal badness. But there's none of that here. The Gardener just drags... and drags... and drags with very little to offer. It's exasperating. I think I was checking the remaining runtime on this more than I have for any film in recent memory. It's just plain rough to watch.

That plot summary kind of sums it up. I watched the extras and actress Katherine Houghton - playing Ellen, the wealthy woman who hires the titular gardner - summed up her interest in the film by saying there was some good class tension in the script. And I guess it's kind of there... her and her husband are elite, rich, white folks living in a gated mansion in Brazil (actually filmed in Puerto Rico), with numerous servants and what not. But really, other than one scene where she's driving through a poor part of town, the class theme never really makes it through. (To be fair, Houghton says as much in the interview.) Basically you just sit there waiting for some plants to kill people (which happens about one-half of one time), and it seems like the filmmakers don't care about class tension *or* plant action.

What do they care about? Pretty plants, socialites getting drunk, and showing the titular gardener shirtless as often as possible. (To their credit Joe Dallesandro is a good-looking man... but it's comical how committed he is to being shirtless.)

And what's worse is the gardener doesn't really do anything. Sure, people he has gardened for have died, and the house staff are wary of his "powers" (saying he's into black magic or something), but basically he just makes plants happen faster than they should, and in places they shouldn't be able to grow. After a (long) while, he somehow hypnotizes Ellen, but you're never too sure what his end game is. He just hops around from garden to garden, and maybe the (female) owners of the garden die. It's never made clear what he gets out of the deal. And don't worry, the ending won't explain it in the least!

I'm actually having a pretty hard time mustering up much of anything else to say about The Gardener. It's just plain dull. Towards the end of the film, I thought for sure it was going to get the first "terrible" tag in a long time, but two things save it. (1) The gardener himself has a funny moment where he pops up from behind a grassy knoll out of nowhere. I literally LOLed, and it was really the only moment in the film where I felt much of anything. And (2) I watched the extras. It's tough for me to be super hard on the film after seeing interviews with director Jim Kay and the two main actors (Dellesandro and Houghton). They all seem like nice people, and don't really have any delusions about the film. Kay stops short of apologizing for it, but freely admits that he should have done a lot of things differently. So, The Gardener... I guess you're safe because of the likability of your cast and director in real life.

But it doesn't change the fact that it pretty much sucks. I don't know what it's going for, and what's worse, I'm not even sure it knows.

I would   definitely not recommend   this film.