“Turmoil at the Roosevelt Island Garden Club” for Movie of the Year

Yeah, I know. There’s a paywall. It’s about people getting drama-y about gardens. But, I’m telling you, there’s going to be a movie. I’m reading it, and I’m casting people in my head.

“Since she came, oh my God, everybody’s fighting,” said Raphael Elbaz, a longtime garden member, as he sat outside the garden gates one afternoon this week. “It’s like the slave became the king.”

Oscar Núñez, maybe? Ideally, you want this character to be your introduction into the world of the Roosevelt Island Garden Club. He should be the sane, even-headed one watching it go up in metaphorical flames.

Metaphorical, you say?

Worst of all, as far as full members are concerned, the garden was closed in late March after a mysterious late-night fire leveled a toolshed, prompting the Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation, which administers the island, to begin trying to get to the bottom of the squabble. A fire marshal’s investigation has so far been inconclusive, but that has not silenced whispers of arson on both sides.

But who is this woman, Erin Ward, who is being all Queen Elizabeth I on us? Is she more of a termagant Jane Lynch? Or is this a dark morality play, not a farce, and she’s more of a Tilda Swinton? She DID ask everyone to start calling her “Madame President”.

She listed many indiscretions she said she had seen, smelled or heard around the shed area on summer nights. Smoking (of more than one substance). Grilling. Bonfires. Club money used to pay for charcoal, propane and food. Composting bins used for Solo cup storage. Physical fighting, once resulting in stitches. “Sex noises.” At least one instance of adultery and a resulting divorce.

Oh. Maybe we want to go with more of a petty taskmaster type? Like a Jane Kaczmarek deal? What about her nemesis, Ron Schuppert, “who attributed the “sex noises” to the garden’s full-throated bullfrogs” and stands accused of nepotism? I think we want the climax of the movie to be the meeting in which “Mr. Schuppert and some of his supporters stayed only long enough to declare it illegitimate, then stormed out,” but does it end with Schuppert and Ward falling in love, despite their differences? Because then we want to cast Schuppert a little younger, less Clint-Eastwood-cranky, more inexplicably-garden-oriented-Idris-Elba-gruff?

Or is he a dark figure as well? A John Malkovich?

Or, and this one is swinging for the fences, is this Tom Cruise’s chance to do some hilarious comedy work and rebuild his acting image a little bit in a lower-budget, “Little Miss Sunshine”-esque turn?

There is also the real possibility that these people should just get their act together and take it down about eighty notches and plant some nasturtiums.