First Cow – first look review

With First Cow, Kel­ly Reichardt, America’s fore­most chron­i­cler of small sto­ries root­ed in metic­u­lous­ly-craft­ed geo­graph­i­cal expans­es, has deliv­ered anoth­er slow­burn heart­break­er. The set­ting is 1820s Ore­gon in a set­tle­ment of beaver-trap­pers. Jonathan Raymond’s source nov­el, ​‘The Half Life’, has anoth­er time­line set in the present-day, which is pared back here to a brief yet omi­nous pro­logue fea­tur­ing Alia Shawkat and a dog dis­cov­er­ing some­thing in the ground.

Mean­while, back in the 1820s, the qui­et­ly spo­ken Cook­ie Figowitz (John Mag­a­ro) finds King Lu (Ori­on Lee) naked in the woods and helps him to escape from blood­thirsty Russ­ian pur­suers. The pair run into each oth­er again, at a lat­er inter­val, at which point the film’s true theme of friend­ship begins to bloom. A sequence of them nest­ing – Cook­ie beat­ing the dust out of a rug while Lu chops wood – dri­ves home that this is nar­ra­tive cen­tred on sen­si­tive, prac­ti­cal men in har­mo­ny with one another.

Lu is in thrall to the Amer­i­can Dream, prone to talk­ing aloud about how he can ascend to a more monied sta­tion in life. Cook­ie is usu­al­ly found in a state of watch­ful silence, but has his own dream: to open a bak­ery. This is the skill that Lu ends up har­ness­ing as a busi­ness oppor­tu­ni­ty. It tran­spires that deli­cious ​“oily cakes” are exact­ly what peo­ple want at a beaver-trap­ping set­tle­ment in 1820s Ore­gon. Some are will­ing to give a gen­er­ous num­ber of ingots to sate this hunger for sweetness.

In the press con­fer­ence fol­low­ing the film’s Berlin Film Fes­ti­val screen­ing, Reichardt spoke about bor­row­ing a canoe from a muse­um; Lee said that he learned to make rope from grass, as well as frag­ments of First Nations lan­guage. His char­ac­ter is a Chi­nese immi­grant who has taught him­self to com­mu­ni­cate with the Native Amer­i­cans who are shown liv­ing with and around the white settlers.

The look of the film is con­stant­ly trans­fix­ing. Vivid world-build­ing leads to a pic­ture that thrums with tac­tile ener­gy. Whether its dirt under the fin­ger­nails of a large, beard­ed man car­ry­ing a baby in a bas­ket, or a Native Amer­i­can girl heav­ing a buck­et of milk that splash­es onto her mauve dress, or René Auber­jonois (who sad­ly passed away at the end of 2019) stand­ing still with a raven on his shoul­der, First Cow puls­es with painter­ly and poet­ic details.

There is also a sur­pris­ing­ly hearty sense of humour here. When the tit­u­lar cow rolls into town, it does so via raft. Reichardt lets the scene play out in almost real-time, as every­one watch­es, mouths agape. The cow attempts a regal still­ness that only ampli­fies how absurd it looks to see a cow on a raft.

Said cow belongs to Chief Fac­tor (Toby Jones), the rich, white over­seer who has a Native Amer­i­can wife (a cameo from Lily Glad­stone) and believes that killing one slave in front of a group can be moti­va­tion­al to work ethics. Even he is afford­ed a hilar­i­ous intro­duc­tion as he los­es his mind over how deli­cious the oily cakes are, and prof­fers Cook­ie the com­pli­ment, ​“I com­mend you, sir, for this deli­cious baked comestible,” a line deliv­ered with fer­vour by Jones.

While there is no short­age of scenes which serve as sources of unex­pect­ed lev­i­ty, dra­mat­ic ten­sion builds slow­ly as Cookie’s cake-mak­ing process puts him and his bud­dy into night­ly dan­ger. Yet, as fans of Reichardt’s work will know, she nev­er con­trives ten­sion. She draws the world then lets the con­flict­ing ele­ments of it play out with under­stat­ed nat­u­ral­ism. The real ten­sion here is between the haves and the have-nots. As twas ever thus, the world is risky for have-nots attempt­ing to move up. It threat­ens the haves, even though they have noth­ing to fear by contrast.

Although in the social por­trai­ture is bleak in First Cow, there is a lush­ness in the green land­scapes, the white light and the warm and respect­ful way that Cook­ie and Lu inter­act with their world and each oth­er. There are visu­al and the­mat­ic par­al­lels with Debra Granik’s Leave No Trace, as well as Reichardt’s own Old Joy from 2006. The meek may not inher­it the earth, but dur­ing the fleet­ing moments that they are allowed to com­mune with it, there are flick­ers of the peace that could be.