First Cow

A story about two outcasts who find friendship and a business partnership with each other in the American frontier.

John Magaro plays a gentle baker who begins the movie as cook for a prospecting expedition. He's too thoughtful and sensitive to really fit in with the macho wild men he's with, who bully and threaten him. Orion Lee is a Chinese immigrant who befriends him and suggests that they go into business selling the baker's biscuits at a local trading post. The biscuits are a sensation, but the enterprise is a dangerous one -- the only place to get milk is to steal it from the cow (yes, THE cow, not A cow) that belongs to the local aristocrat, played by the always welcome Toby Jones. The film begins in the present day with a hiker in the woods discovering something that hints at how the movie will end, and how the movie then circles back to that find is a small miracle of narrative storytelling.

Kelly Reichardt, who's made a career of quiet, understated films, remains true to form here. "First Cow" shows much more than it tells, which should please fans of art house fare but will probably frustrate more casual moviegoers who have less patience for the way stories are told. The two main characters don't talk much, but we learn much about them, not from what they say, but from how they act. The first time we see Magaro's character, for example, he's hunting for mushrooms in the woods, and he takes the time to set a salamander he finds back on its feet when it's struggling to flip itself over. And when Lee's character shows him to his cabin in the woods, the first thing Magaro does is find some wildflowers with which to decorate the small space. Little flourishes like these reward the patient viewer, and we come to like the two men so much that the end, though we've been warned of it in advance, feels that much more tragic when it comes.

Covid has seen to it that 2020 hasn't exactly been the most robust year for movies, but of movies that have been released so far this year, "First Cow" is one of the best I've seen.

Grade: A

The movie begins with a modern day scene, we know the period only because we see a modern ship on the river. Then soon a skull is discovered and then two adult skeletons laying side by side in either a shallow grave, or maybe just covered by debris over the past 150+ years.

Most of the story is in the 1800s as explorers travel west to build a new life and perhaps find some of that gold. Gradually two men become friends, one a Chinaman the other a man from Maryland trained as a cook after being orphaned. When the first cow shows up, owned by a wealthy man, the two hatch a plan to form a business.

It is a nice story of friendship and cooperation to overcome obstacles, but as the period would dictate the men are dirty, the scenes are unattractive, and the story often moves quite slowly. It is almost 2 hours and I found myself wishing it had been 80 to 90 minutes.

The user reviews are quite polarized, many love it while many hate it. I can understand both extremes, I am somewhere in the middle.

My wife and I watched it at home on BluRay from my local library.

"It's the getting started that's the puzzle. No way for a poor man to start. ... You need capital, or you need some kind of miracle." "You need leverage." "Or a crime."

Another excellent Western from Kelly Reichardt, one with high production quality and which quietly subverts the genre's traditional themes. That starts with the two protagonists, King-Lu and Cookie (Orion Lee and John Magaro) who are rational, somewhat timid guys who hit on a plan to make a fortune via baked goods (yes, baked goods). Cookie is quite the domestic for the hero of a Western, and can crank out a clafoutis if necessary. The buddy he meets, King-Lu, is from China but is the antithesis of stereotypical representations, having traveled the world and multi-lingual, including English and the local Native American dialect. How fantastic is it that these guys aren't macho gunslingers, that they cook, sew, sweep the house, and forage while trying to figure out how to take advantage of this "land of riches." Meanwhile, the Native Americans themselves aren't blood-thirsty savages, they're people and they co-exist with the colonizers, which is reasonably accurate for the 1820's, a few decades before mass colonization would lead to genocide.

Despite the relative harmony, there is a quiet, rather ominous danger everywhere, from a bully in the fur trapping group promising to wait outside the fort after Cookie is paid to rob him, to King Lu describing how his friend was gutted from neck to loin because he was suspected of being a thief, to the more powerful men who debate how many lashes are appropriate in corporal punishment which is clearly at their discretion. There is no real law and order here, just force, and might makes right. At the same time, Reichardt is incredibly restrained in not showing a lot of violence, or reveling in it as a lesser director might have done.

Meanwhile, the message comes through that the West wasn't won with frontier spirit or some other aspect of mythical American exceptionalism, it was won with crime. Sure, the two mild-mannered fellas with big dreams steal milk from a rich guy's cow to make some delicious oily cakes, setting up a pop-up food stall (ok food blanket) that's quite popular with the locals, enriching themselves in the process. But the rich guy is stealing resources from the Native Americans and idiotically believes that the beaver can be trapped without limit. When he's told by King-Lu how vast the original beaver population was in the state, he can't extrapolate what greed will do to the population eventually, or doesn't want to (and indeed, the beaver was almost driven to extinction in Oregon). The little thieves end up in shallow graves, the big thief ends up likely lauded in the state's history, with a town probably named after him.

The first cow (fantastically played by Evie the cow btw) is thus a symbol of the natural order shifting, and in a profound way. Early on in a small saloon, one man remarks "This ain't a place for cows. God would've put cows here if it was." Another replies "No place for white men either then." It's notable that the cow is there so a rich man can have cream in his tea, and so he can display his status and sophistication to visitors who might look down on his rustic surroundings. It's a luxury, and reserved for him alone. It's the tip of an enormous iceberg, of many more white men with their precious possessions, of a lifestyle that will ravage the environment for the sake of personal wealth. In the opening shot in the present day, an enormous (and very ugly) cargo barge is seen going down the river. It's a shot I almost forgot by the time the film ended, but it seems to show in a subtle way the result of 200 years of such a lifestyle.

That's an aspect of Reichardt's direction I admire most, just how much she holds back and lets the viewer think about. There is a powerful message here, but it's delivered with great subtlety. Most of the scenes are played without a soundtrack in the background, and she doesn't feel a need to include shots to fill everything in for the viewer. There were places where I felt the film could have moved along a little more quickly and it won't be for everyone, but the more I thought about it afterwards, the more I appreciated what she had done.

Half of the audience that watches this film will likely hate it. I'm starting with that because this film is incredibly slow in terms of pacing, which will easily turn off the impatient viewers. Personally, if a film like that has an interesting story, a slow pace actually helps to suck me into a story. First Cow, which is one of A24's most recent releases, has just become available on-demand. While I wouldn't rank it among their best when looking at their stellar catalog of films in recent years, it's still a great movie all around.

First Cow follows a highly skilled survivalist/cook in Cookie Figowitz (John Magaro), as he stumbles upon a group of traders. Becoming close friends with King-Lu (Orion Lee), they illegally take an opportunity to earn themselves a profit. Once a cow arrives on one of the farms, they steal milk in order to cook biscuits for the townspeople. All seems well and good, but they can only keep it a secret for so long. This premise held my attention so well because the film continuously gave you reasons to care about the two main characters. It was that, on top of the slow pace that really kept me invested.

Films like Meek's Cutoff and Night Moves are what had me keeping an eye on director Kelly Reichardt because I found those films showed her true potential as a filmmaker. She's wonderful at bringing out the best in all of her performers. What kept me from loving those two films overall though, was the fact that I found them to be a little too drab in terms of sound design and music. That's clearly her signature because First Cow once again feels a little too much like that. I loved watching this film and everything that happens felt earned and satisfying, but the overall movie can feel a little lifeless at times. That's really my only issue with most of her film that I've seen. She's otherwise an award-worthy filmmaker in my eyes.

Yes, John Magaro and Orion Lee are both terrific and hold this film together from start to finish, but the real star of the show here is cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt. Having worked on her two aforementioned films as well as a few others, his work on Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot and Mid90s is when his name truly jumped out at me. Blauvelt is someone that I will begin researching and anxiously awaiting his next project, simply due to the fact that his work on First Cow was his best yet. The camerawork felt like a character in its own right. From certain ways, characters are framed to extreme wide shots that clearly have deeper meanings, the way this film looks pulled me in more than anything else.

In the end, there are things about the tone that bothered me throughout the entire movie, but the story, characters, and especially the way the film is shot held my attention throughout. It's hard to recommend this movie to those who are casual viewers and were looking to be entertained because I can almost guarantee that you won't be unless you're a film buff and know what to expect. If it wasn't for the dour feel of the whole thing just not clicking with me, I might be saying that I loved this movie. Overall, it's a very, very well-made film that deserves attention, but from the proper audience.

It may be because of how I watched this - First Cow and Reichardt's films in general call for seeing it in a cinema if at all possible, she simply has that eye and ear for the minutest details and for the time she takes with every shot and many scenes to draw out the feeling of a place as well as for the actors to settle in, that you want to sink in to this film as a sensory experience, and instead I saw it at home where (I don't know about you but) I have too many distractions, not least of which the phone on a busy weekday - but it took me about fifteen to twenty minutes or so to get into the mood of this film. I wasn't sure if it might go anywhere really, as it follows the Cookie character as he is part of this fur trapping outfit (or almost on the outside, just barely with it, but enough to be in it without, say, getting into scraps/fights like the others), and it was frankly slow-going.

But then the story, as much as it is, kicks in and it becomes this very simple tale of a friendship and what may be a fairly minor crime in the grand scheme of things - taking milk from a cow that isn't there's so they can make oily cakes, basically the 1820's rural Oregon equivalent of what I assume is Krispy Kreme - and how it gets tested and firms as they become more successful and gain the employ of the wealthiest man in the area (Toby Jones), who... also happens to own the cow that they've been milking. It's so engrossing because of its simplicity, the delicacy and yet the immediacy of the world that Reichardt has recreated for us. Like all the best period filmmakers, she and her collaborators bring this part of America/the Pacific North-west to life in almost a humble sort of way: it isn't ostentatious, it's just... what it was, and that makes it special.

Aside from the performances themselves from these two, I have to wonder if the power of this film comes from something that maybe Reichardt was conscious of or maybe she wasn't, but this story makes me think about filmmaking itself, especially of the independent kind (or art creation in general). You have to assemble the right ingredients, and it most often takes some tenacity for it to all come together like it should (and how many times have you heard of someone on an indie movie shoot "going guerilla" or "stealing a shot" from some such and such a location they didn't have a permit for, etc). It feels like a story that Reichardt has lived at some point in her life, and she gets to deepen on the themes she worked in on Old Joy, also about a male friendship that gets tested by cirumstance.

And what's fascinating is how because of the slow-burn-ness of the pacing, by the time it gets to the last half hour or final quarter, it has some real suspense as we wonder how our two great lawbreakers will get out of this as they get hunted down. It's not quite to the same level of poetic grungy-frontier depiction heights as a McCabe & Mrs. Miller, but it has that same looseness and understanding about humanity, and if anything is less pessimistic about equality between people of different backgrounds and races. What happens after the end credits start to roll? I don't know, and I don't need to is the point - they've gotten through some s***, and they're together.