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

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.

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.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but Director Kelly Reichardt doesn't do plot driven movies. Still, FIRST COW is a feature where one has to be observant from the very first shot to the final one.

Reichardt's method of expression is to create a setting and fully immerse the viewer in it. Even though it's based on a novel by Jonathan Raymond (who also co-wrote the screenplay with the Director), FIRST COW isn't concerned with telling a tight knit tale, indeed the characters themselves seem to be exploring and creating their own "plot". They're own history. It's 1820s Oregon and two drifters, Cookie (John Magaro) and King-Lu (Orion Lee) end up in a small town with little at their disposal but some vague hope to keep on moving until they find themselves. The title animal comes to town and the pair find some short-term opportunity to use it's precious milk. Toby Jones is the owner of the Cow - and the richest man in the hamlet.

As is Reichardt's manner, the pacing is deliberate, her camera mostly steady (the movie is framed in the old fashioned 1:37 ratio) and the editing stately. She seems averse to making even the most intense situation palpable to the audience (her previous film, CERTAIN WOMEN, probably had cinema's least dramatic hostage sequences). Reichardt depicts the situation, and the viewer must create their own drama. It doesn't always work (WENDY AND LUCY), but, here as in OLD JOY, there is a vividness in the depiction that makes it worthwhile, if still not entirely satisfying.

Reichardt is an interesting talent and FIRST COW is an immersive dive into the old frontier (there is talk of going south towards the promised land of California and its emerging cities) even if it never quite strikes deep enough.

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.