First Cow
Kelly Reichardt (2019)
An early shot in Kelly Reichardt’s latest film shows a riverboat, the ‘Belle – – -‘ (I couldn’t make out the last three letters), which gradually crosses the screen. The boat’s name and rate of progress are a taste of things to come. First Cow, shown at this year’s Glasgow Film Festival, often looks beautiful. It also moves very slowly indeed. The action, if that’s the word, takes place in what was, before settlement and statehood, Oregon Country. The time is the early nineteenth century, except for a prologue which, effectively, draws the viewer in. In the present day, a young woman (Alia Shawkat) walks her dog in Oregon woodland. The animal begins scratching at something just below the topsoil. It’s a skull; the dog-walker investigates further and discovers two human skeletons side by side. The camera stays on the same patch of ground. Now a thirty-something man is gathering mushrooms there. We’re no longer in the present day. The forager is Otis Figowitz (John Magaro), known as Cookie because of his job, as a travelling chef for a fur trapping company.
It’s soon clear that the bones to be discovered two centuries later will be those of Cookie and King-Lu (Orion Lee), a Chinese immigrant and the other main character. When the pair first meets, King-Lu is hiding in the woods, having killed a Russian (in self-defence) and being hunted by the victim’s compatriots. Cookie lets King-Lu sleep in his tent before the Chinese escapes early next morning across a river. Reichardt never makes the identity of the skeletons explicitly clear but her closing image is of Cookie and King-Lu lying down to rest, side by side, in woodland, and unaware they’re being tracked by a gunman. And that’s not all. At the start, the taciturn, doleful Cookie is bullied by a band of trappers, who complain he’s not feeding them properly. The thrust of the story to follow is that, even in a still primitive capitalist world, the odds are stacked against the likes of King-Lu and (especially) Cookie. The meek shall inherit the earth only in the sense of ending up in it.
What seems to be a couple of years after their first encounter, the protagonists bump into each other again, in a saloon bar. King-Lu now lives in a woodland shack and invites Cookie back there. The two men hit it off (in an understated way, of course) and summarise their personal histories and hopes. The internationally travelled King-Lu wants to farm. Cookie, who moved from his native Maryland in order to find work, would like to run his own bakery and, one day, a hotel in San Francisco. King-Lu mentions the recent arrival in Oregon Country of its first cow, shipped from California (though breeding plans have been delayed: a bull and calf accompanying the cow both died on the journey). Its owner is an Englishman, referred to as the Chief Factor[1] (and not otherwise named), who also owns, again uniquely in the area, a large house with grounds. Cookie, who once worked for a baker in Boston, reckons he could make a living if he had access to a cow. He and King-Lu decide to sneak into the Factor’s property under cover of darkness to milk the animal. They’re soon doing this regularly. Cookie uses the stolen goods to make so-called ‘oily cakes’.
These are soon selling like, well, hot cakes. Customers inquire about the recipe but the baker and King-Lu keep their trade secret, mentioning only a ‘secret Chinese ingredient’. Even as they rake in cash, one waits impatiently for the tide to turn. It has to, not only because, as the savvier King-Lu points out, the window of commercial opportunity is narrow – their milch cow won’t be the only cow in town for long. It’s also because Cookie, whenever he’s on screen, announces that things will go wrong (he looks as if he’s read the script). King-Lu tempers his friend’s hotelier dream with realism but doesn’t need to: John Magaro’s expression makes clear that Cookie has no more chance of making it in Frisco than Midnight Cowboy‘s principals had of sharing the good life in Florida. Orion Lee’s emotionally suppler King-Lu is likeable but it’s only the lovely, light-brown cow that brings an occasional smile to Cookie’s face and gets him talking easily, as he sits milking her.
The Chief Factor is much discussed before he actually appears; the fact that he’ll be played by Toby Jones adds to the sense of anticipation. Jones reaches the screen 1:08:40 into the two-hour film and briefly gives it a shot in the arm. When the Factor first tries one of the oily cakes it brings on almost a Proust’s madeleine moment. ‘I taste London in this’, the Factor declares, waxing nostalgic about a bakery he once patronised in South Kensington. He promptly commissions Cookie to bake a clafoutis for the forthcoming visit to his home of an army captain. The latter’s scorn for unsophisticated frontier life riles the Englishman, who informs Cookie that ‘I mean to humiliate him’. (Courtesy of the posh flan, though the fruit in it, faute de mieux, will be humble blueberries.) The different notes struck by the Factor in his opening scene amount – in this film – to relative complexity of character and Toby Jones makes the most of the opportunity but it’s about the only one he has. From this point on, the Factor is strictly a grandee manqué. The declared intention to worst his guest backfires. It’s the host who ends up looking silly.
The episode on the Factor’s property is striking thanks largely to his household’s diversity. He’s married to a Native American (Lily Gladstone) whose extended family, including her father (Gary Farmer), also lives in the house. She’s on screen for only a few minutes but Lily Gladstone, who made a strong impression in a larger role in Reichardt’s previous (and much better) film, Certain Women (2016), is a remarkable presence. The Factor’s wife, a handsome woman and modestly gracious hostess, wears a gown that contradicts her ethnicity, and the traditional tribal costume of her relatives: her fancy dress might almost be fancy dress. Her husband means to keep it that way, and to assert his Eurocentric credentials when he asks the visiting captain (Scott Shepherd), recently in France, about latest Paris fashions and ‘couleurs du jour’. Showing off his cow, the Factor details her fancy European pedigree (part Alderney, part Froment du Léon). The captain is duly impressed by the clafoutis but the Factor, as he offers his guest cream for his tea, admits his cow produces barely any milk. The puzzle as to why is solved that night, when the intruders’ milking routine is disturbed. The superior captain is on hand to witness the Factor’s mortifying discovery.
The remainder of the story consists largely of Cookie and King-Lu’s trying to avoid retribution for stealing the milk and humiliating the local bigwig. It comes as almost a relief when, for a few screen minutes, the main characters are literally on the run from the Factor’s men (led by Ewan Bremner) but the pursuit, more often, seems hardly more energetic than what’s gone before. First Cow has been admired as, among other things, a ‘neo-western’. This viewer is poorly qualified to say what a western, neo- or otherwise, should be but even I felt starved of incident. Experts may disagree but Reichardt’s recreation of the time and place struck me as scrupulously realistic – in, for example, a scene in a market place, with vendors of different nationalities, and the sequence in the saloon where Cookie and King-Lu meet up again. But this recreation seems to be the limit of the film’s invention. It provides a context not for action but for a mood of persisting pessimism. This is sometimes jarringly expressed, as when King-Lu sententiously quotes the overheard conversation between the Chief Factor and the captain, telling Cookie, ‘There are no Empire silhouettes or couleurs du jour for us’.
Reichardt wrote the screenplay with Jon Raymond, author of scripts for other films she’s made and of the 2004 novel, The Half-Life, on which this was one is based. (Perhaps it’s not surprising the title was changed – not that First Cow screams box office but at least it’s a fair description of the subject.) First Cow has been widely praised, with (to date) 161 positive reviews on Rotten Tomatoes from a total of 169. Simply because the pair seldom agree, it’s worth noting that the few naysayers include Richard Brody and Armond White but the summary comments of two other green-splodge dissenters are especially pertinent. Charles Solomon (Filmweek – KPCC-NPR Los Angeles) complains that he ‘could not make out much of the dialogue and a lot of [the film] is so under-lit’. Louisa Moore (Screen Zealots) is ‘shocked First Cow has found its place atop so many “best of the year” lists, which is precisely why people generally don’t trust film critics’. Moore’s review appeared on the last day of last year; she was probably, and reasonably, reeling from the recent news that the New York Film Critics Circle had declared First Cow the best film of 2020[2]! When Solomon complains about under-lighting, he may mean darkness. Christopher Blauvelt’s lighting seemed to me masterly in daytime sequences, particularly the woodland ones, but there’s no denying that a big chunk of the film – the first meeting of Cookie and King-Lu, their visits to the Factor’s estate – happens at night. I watched the film online with subtitles: without them, I, like Solomon, wouldn’t have heard much at all.
Reichardt’s film features various birds and beasts in addition to the title character and the canine excavator at the start. At one point a mongrel dog runs into shot and stands on its hind legs, tail wagging, to sniff round a basket of oily cakes. It then turns and looks into the camera, as if asking, ‘Was that OK or do you want another take?’ This mutt’s cheerful histrionics made a refreshing change from the meticulously downbeat human acting, of John Magaro in particular. I keep having to stop myself calling the movie Poor Cow – arguably a more appropriate name in this case than it was for Ken Loach’s 1967 drama (which is, in several ways, one of his more cheerful pieces). Confirmation in a film’s closing titles that animal action was monitored by American Humane is always welcome. But the tedium of First Cow, with its snail’s-pace storytelling and drab theme, is pervasive. I was left wanting assurance that no animals were bored in the making of this picture.
6 March 2021
[1] According to Wikipedia, factors, in the period in question, were ‘mercantile intermediaries whose main functions were warehousing and selling consigned goods, accounting to principals for the proceeds, guaranteeing buyers’ credit, and sometimes making cash advances to principals prior to the actual sale of the goods. Their services were of particular value in foreign trade, and factors became important figures in the great period of colonial exploration and development’.
[2] First Cow premiered at the 2019 Telluride Festival, hence its IMDb year date, but wasn’t released theatrically in the US until early March 2020.