First Cow

The film's visual style is impressive but it's story and pacing is what really drags this film down for me. The cinematography is the one aspect I found to be excellent. The framing is on point and impressive and it adds a lot to the film's style. The production design and costumes are also really good here too. These characters look and feel as if they in the 1820s. The performances are also great too. Each character feels believable and works to help tell the story of the film. Although I like all that, the pacing is not very good. It feels incredibly long and tedious without any real majorly satisfying payoff. It's a 2 hour movie that feels like it goes on for 2 and a half hours. If they had cut down some of the scenes, this issue wouldn't be as major as it is. There were some elements of the story I enjoyed and some I found to be pointless. If you like A24 then check it out but don't have your hopes incredibly high for it.

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

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.

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.

For those viewers who believe the pace of the film is "slow", yes, there are no car chases. Instead, this film has a depth of character and original development that creates a mood so beautifully of the time and place. It is refreshing to have a plot that keeps the viewer's interest throughout. When the majority of movie offerings out there are pure trash, this film is a real treat.