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First Cow (Kelly Reichardt, 2019)
🕑 Added 2020-08-06 19:50:36 +0000 UTC
There is a jarring simplicity to Kelly Reichardt's First Cow, a modesty that, on close inspection, serves to momentarily disguise just how perfect of a film it actually is. If First Cow has any real faults, they lie only in this perfection. More than one review has compared Reichardt's film to a storybook, with its deliberate pacing, Academy ratio, and iconized characters with their rather limited psychology. Because of the fable structure of First Cow, it is ambiguous neither in its trajectory nor its essential meaning. It is a film that declares itself, whereas previous efforts by Reichardt, such as Old Joy, Wendy and Lucy, and especially Meek's Cutoff, had much more capacity to surprise.
Nevertheless, there's little point in holding First Cow's exacting neatness against it. By telling a story about the westward expansion -- this is another of Reichardt's Oregon stories -- First Cow returns us to the foundational mythos of frontier capitalism and individual initiative, to patiently demonstrate how elitism, racism, and economic inequality were ever-present aspects of the American democratic experiment.
But at the same time, there is a certain "nice guys finish last" element running through First Cow, and if this seems to simplify or cheapen the film's portrait of friendship or critique of cutthroat, authoritarian business practice, it is perhaps also the aspect of Reichardt's film that is most resonant in the present day. First Cow begins with a brief prologue, where we see current, titanic capital in the form of shipping a trade. (This, courtesy of a few lovely shots meant to evoke the films of the late Peter Hutton, to whom First Cow is dedicated.) And then a contemporary hiker (Alia Shawkat) discovered the buried bones of our two protagonists. So we are clearly meant to make concrete connections between what we see in the film's time and our own.
And this has as much to do with acceptable forms of masculinity as it does with race, power, and privilege. We meet Cookie (John Magaro) as he is traveling with a trio of fur trappers. He is as soft-spoken as they are rude and violent, and one of the men indicates that he has been itching to take out his frustrations on Cookie for the entire expedition. Soon, Cookie encounters King-Lu (Orion Lee) in the woods, naked and shivering. Despite the obvious risk to himself, Cookie feeds, clothes, and shelters King-Lu back at the camp. And while it seems clear that Cookie would help anyone in need, his kinship with the polite, articulate Chinese gentleman is instantly apparent.
So the two men start a small business, based on Cookie's baking skills and King-Lu's entrepreneurial vision. In order to make their very popular "oily cakes," however, they must go out under cover of night and steal milk from the region's only cow, brought to camp by the wealthy English settler Chief Factor (Toby Jones). We know based on Reichardt's adherence to basic narrative codes that Cookie and King-Lu will not get away with their scheme forever. In fact, in true crime-genre fashion, the plot unravels when the men attempt "one last heist."
But more importantly, we know that First Cow is a demonstration of American history as the crushing of the weak by the strong. There are moments that underline this almost gracelessly, such as when King-Lu speaks to Chief Factor and his guest (Scott Shepherd) conversationally, as if he were an equal, and the men look at the "Chinaman" with disgust.
But what is most successful about First Cow, the aspect that goes beyond schematic elaboration and achieves a more visceral impact, is Reichardt's depiction of the relationship between Cookie and King-Lu. Magaro and Lee's performances are notable for their strategic anachronism. They come across as two civilized men stranded in an animalistic world, and in this respect Reichardt, intentionally or not, allows them to be metonymic for all the ordinary, hard-working, respectful Americans being shoved in the ditch by Donald Trump's meathead bullyocracy.
