First Cow

In her latest picture, Kelly Reichardt returns to the 19th century period of her best film Meek’s Cutoff to tell a different kind of frontier story. First Cow follows the friendship between a cook (John Magaro), who travels with fur trappers to the Oregon Territory, and an ambitious Chinese immigrant (Orion Lee) he meets in a mining camp. When they discover that a wealthy British landowner (Toby Jones) has brought a cow into the territory—so that he can have milk in his tea—they hit upon an idea for a small business and begin to put down temporary roots. The film delivers another simple micro-story from Reichardt that manages to cover a wealth of themes with very few characters and only a handful of narrative beats.

The less said about this director’s films before seeing them (and after, really) the better. Her movies deliver rewarding cinematic experiences for viewers who enjoy a deliberate pace and a subtext that isn’t spoon-fed. One thing I will say about First Cow is that it has more laughs than any prior Reichardt picture. It is also less of a slice of life than most of her work, with a narrative that unfolds like a parable of American style supply and demand economics. But it is also, like most of her pictures, about a friendship forged at the margins of society.

Once again, Reichardt’s principal collaborator is author Jonathan Raymond, who co-wrote the screenplay based loosely on his historical novel The Half-Life (though there is no cow in Raymond’s expansive novel). The film opens with a quote William Blake’s “Proverbs of Hell,” which could adorn many of this director’s films: “The bird, a nest, the spider, a web, man friendship.” First Cow depicts a harsh world, but there is something comforting about spending time with the characters that inhabit it.