First Cow: An anti-mythic tale of the Old West, fabulous fritters, lactic larceny and larger themes
By Karen Gordon
Rating: B-plus
Some movies deal with the settling of the American West as mythic. And then there are films like writer/director Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow, which strips it down to its basics for a more human scale and poetic vision of the Western era.
Minus winners and losers, villains and heroes, this is a sparsely settled, muddy world where some people seek fortunes, and others do what they need day-to-day to survive.
Orion Lee and John Magaro are partners-in-milk rustling in Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow.
Set around 1820 in Oregon, the story centers on two men who form a bond of friendship. Cookie (John Magaro), makes his living as a cook for hire. As the film starts, he’s working for rough men: fur trappers who are wending their way through a forest gathering pelts on route to the trading post to cash in.
Cookie briefly encounters King-Lu (Orion Lee), a Chinese immigrant/adventurer who is hiding out in the woods from a group pf Russian immigrants who believe he murdered their companion. The idea that King-Lu is a murderer doesn’t put Cookie off. King-Lu is naked, cold and hungry. Cookie gives him food and shelter in his tent.
The two meet again sometime later at a small settlement built around the local trading post. This time, King-Lu returns the favour, inviting Cookie to stay in his little shack in a clearing in the woods not far from the center of that little town. Where Cookie is quiet and introverted, King-Lu is expansive, an optimistic adventurer who sees through the muddy, dullness of frontier life to the potential of working up the ladder. He’s a natural entrepreneur.
Cookie pitches in with the housekeeping and, of course the cooking. And the two drift into a daily rhythm. Things change when the men discover that the town now has its first dairy cow, the property of Chief Factor (Toby Jones), a rich landowner, and immigrant from Britain. If he had the milk, Cookie could up his game. So, the two men start a ritual. They sneak over at night and milk the cow.
Cookie uses the stolen milk to make a kind of fritter called an ‘oily cake’ that the two sell in the town’s market. In this small outpost, the little fritters become a hit and the two men are soon prospering. But given that the key ingredient is stolen milk, how long can they continue?
First Cow is an adaptation of a novel called The Half-Life by Jonathan Raymond, who worked on the screen adaptation with Reichardt. This is their fifth collaboration.
It’s the seventh feature film from director Reichardt. Over the course of movies like Wendy and Lucy, Meek’s Cutoff and Certain Women, she’s established a story-telling style that is as compelling as it is low key.
Reichardt’s movies seem to focus on the subtle dynamics of characters who are in or trying to get into relationships of some sort. But even though it’s often not explicit, the movie draws in larger themes as well. In other words, the larger context of the story becomes clearer as you contemplate the main story.
The style is miles away from more mainstream movies that tend to telegraph the story’s trajectory or put exposition in the mouths of characters to keep things moving forward. Reichardt avoids conventional ways of building to a climax or any kind of hysteria to keep us on the edge of our seats.
In that way, she’s perhaps one of the least pedantic American filmmakers today. It’s a style that, for her growing number of fans (and I count myself among them), is intriguing.
But it’s risky. Reichardt trusts her audience to go with the storytelling and to reflect. But at the same time, without a more dramatic emotional storyline, the style can feel flat and leave some viewers wondering what they’ve just seen.
That doesn’t mean that First Cow is without imagination or humour. The movie is quiet and somewhat enigmatic. But with the friendship between the two men at its center, and the contrast of the various people they encounter, it’s rewarding on many levels.
Reichardt, who also edits her films, has shot the movie in a 4:3 ratio, or a square screen, instead of the more familiar letterbox presentation. And she uses it well to bring everything closer in.
She’s been careful to try and capture the feel of this Oregon frontier. The vision of this little outpost, with its muddy center square and people who never seem to be clean enough, is visceral. Just from the point of cleanliness alone, the contrast between the daily lives of people who buy the oily cakes in the market and the more affluent life of Chief Factor is startling.
In First Cow, the friendship between the two men is what we’re looking at, and where she wants you to focus.
But there is much more going on, and much to contemplate as you leave the theatre - from ideas of capitalism and colonization to a perhaps more spiritual question about the things that really endure.
First Cow. Directed and co-written by Kelly Reichardt. Starring John Magaro, Orion Lee and Toby Jones. Opens Friday, March 13 at the TIFF Bell Lightbox.