Movie of the Week: FIRST COW (Kelly Reichardt, 2019)
It’s udderly great (sorry)
If First Cow didn’t already occupy a special place in my heart by virtue of being awesome, it would forever be lodged in my memory as the last movie I saw in a theater before Covid brought the world to its knees in early 2020. What a strange night, which is really not strange at all in retrospect: Reichardt fist-bumping the American Cinematheque programmers rather than shaking their hands as they introduced her for the Q&A; the unusually long lines for the bathroom because everyone was taking extra time to scrub their hands for twenty seconds. The fear in the air, however, did not distract from the quality of what was on screen, or the wonderfully prickly presence of Reichardt, who remains an underrated American master. With a mise-en-scène carrying whiffs of revisionist westerns like Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), First Cow, distilled by Reichardt and her longtime writing partner Jonathan Raymond from Raymond’s novel The Half Life, nonetheless strikes an unusual note: a tender tale of male friendship within a genre — and a time in American history — that seems to forget about anyone who wasn’t a gunslinger. When Cookie Figowitz (John Magaro), a quiet loner and gifted cook, meets King Lu (Orion Lee), an eloquent Chinese immigrant on the run from a murder charge, Reichardt locates the sweep of romance in their blooming connection but never quite suggests that their relationship is anything but platonic. Cookie probably hasn’t had a good friend in ages, maybe ever, and King Lu probably hasn’t met someone as nice as Cookie in ages, maybe ever. (The scene of them moving in together, King chopping wood outside while Cookie places a single wildflower on the mantlepiece, is exquisitely and profoundly innocent.) Their settlement on the Oregon Trail shows white immigrants and Native Americans living together in relative peace; the hilariously muted conflict only arises when a local English landowner, Chief Factor (Toby Jones), imports the region’s first cow. King, sensitive to the arrival of opportunity and aware of Cookie’s culinary skills, hatches an ingenious yet ultimately foolish plan to secure their prosperous future in the region. For the American dream rarely lasts long — and even this seemingly pleasant iteration of it was fundamentally rooted in theft. As the milk turns sour, the film’s long-delayed brush with mortality beckons one of the most beautiful endings in recent movies. A patient study of male camaraderie, the thrill of entrepreneurship, and the follies of capitalism, with Lily Gladstone and Alia Shawkat in small but crucial roles.
Available for rent on Apple TV, Amazon Prime, and other major platforms.
Bonus content: here’s a picture of my friend Jonah posing outside the Aero that day:
