Some spoilers follow for “First Cow.”
Kelly Reichardt’s films are chameleons. At first, they seem like romanticized versions of American tropes: the bond between a girl and her dog, in “Wendy and Lucy;” a pair of friends on a camping trip, in “Old Joy;” the pioneering spirit of early settlers, in “Meek’s Cutoff.” But look again, and the deeper emotional truths of these films are revealed: the crippling grip of poverty; the foreign terror of the frontier; the loneliness of adulthood. Reichardt’s filmography is united by deep disgust with the legends we parrot about this country, and how those myths ignore the profound suffering experienced by countless people every day, and to ignore her anger is to obfuscate the intentions of her work.
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All of that brings us to “First Cow.” Released by A24 in theaters earlier this year and available as of July 10 for digital rental and purchase, “First Cow” tells an intimate story about a particular friendship in the Oregon Territory in 1820. “First Cow” has been heralded by critics for the performances of co-leads John Magaro and Orion Lee, for the intentionality of Reichardt’s narrative, and for the gorgeous claustrophobia of Christopher Blauvelt’s cinematography. A24 has also made Eve the Cow available on Cameo, if you have $30 to spend on a message from the bovine star.
What has been discomfiting about the “First Cow” discourse, though, is how much of it has focused on describing Reichardt’s film as gentle or tranquil. There are certainly serene elements: Magaro’s performance as Cookie Figowitz is infused with deep sensitivity and compassion. The friendship Cookie develops with Chinese immigrant King-Lu (Lee) is defined by empathy and affection. And the film opens on a brisk day in Oregon, Reichardt’s camera capturing the movement of a cargo ship in real-time, its massive bulk a contrast with the natural settings around it. The golden-leafed trees, the verdant ferns, and the jewel-blue water are picturesque—and they hide the startling reveal of two skeletons, barely buried under the soil and mud and sand. Laid out next to each other, heads slightly together. A reminder of how you can better understand a land by the deaths that occurred upon it.
Reichardt (working off the novel “The Half-Life” by Jon Raymond, and in the 4:3 aspect ratio of “Meek’s Cutoff”) then takes us back to the early 19th century, when the Oregon Territory was mostly still wild country. A bond is created by a single moment of kindness: Cookie, foraging for mushrooms to feed the rude, base trappers who employ him, comes across King-Lu, hiding in the forest from Russians who want to kill him. Cookie brings food, then offers King-Lu refuge in his tent. The next day, when King-Lu sneaks off, Cookie never expects to see him again. His act was selfless and demanded no reward.
When Cookie meets King-Lu again at the Royal West Pacific Trading Post, King-Lu exhibits smoothness that is surprising for a man who Cookie met fearing for his life. But it becomes clear as the pair grow close that King-Lu’s ease, which Lee communicates so well, is tied to the confidence of his capitalist ambition. “I sense opportunity here,” says King-Lu, who after two years in this country has a small shack, a few cooking tools, and a couple of chickens to his name—not much, but more than Cookie. This is the American Dream, King-Lu figures, and there’s more to come. “I see something in this land I haven’t seen before … This is still new. More nameless things around here than you can shake an eel at,” he tells Cookie. The pause Cookie takes before uttering his oppositional response captures the tension between the friends: “Doesn’t seem new to me. Seems old.”
On practically every issue, Cookie and King-Lu are on contrasting sides, and greed, construed as the American way, increasingly factors into that division. For nearly everyone he meets, Cookie’s worth is indelibly tied to how much he can provide for others. He is not a person, but a product. Perhaps that is why he feels such kinship with the first dairy cow that arrives in the territory, the property of Chief Factor (Toby Jones), the British expat who holds a position of power at the trading post. Cookie watches the cow take its first steps onto the shore, its auburn bulk bathed in golden light, and learns that the steer and calf who were also scheduled to arrive in Oregon died during the journey. (Maguro’s delivery of “I’m sorry about your husband” to the cow is the film’s purest moment.) And the cow’s milk production is tied to its worth, just like Cookie’s skill with pastry.
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With a bowl of milk stolen from that cow in the middle of the night, Cookie bakes a batch of biscuits—and the first comment King-Lu makes is about profits: “How much do you think someone would pay for a biscuit like that?” When King-Lu and Cookie take their offerings to the trading post, they’re such a hit that the traders who so disdainfully treated Cookie earlier fight over the last one. To the lucky few who eat one of Cookie’s oily cakes (fresh fried doughnuts with honey and cinnamon), the dessert brings up memories of home—and to procure one is a sign of one’s prestige and wealth. King-Lu keeps raising the prices. Cookie keeps stealing the milk. Their little pile of money, promissory notes, and shells keeps growing, and their dreams of owning a farm or a bakery seem more attainable. Maybe they could start again in San Francisco. Maybe their partnership could grow into a fortune.
But a happily-ever-after story is not the one Reichardt is telling. Although Cookie and King-Lu’s friendship has moments of beguiling charm, it is corrupted by economic desperation that spirals into profound recklessness. When Chief Factor asks Cookie to bake a blueberry clafoutis to impress a colleague, King-Lu mocks the man’s obsession with aristocracy. Chief Factor is one kind of American archetype (authoritarian, smug, foppish) and King-Lu is another (individualistic, single-minded, clever), and they cannot co-exist. That incompatibility comes to a head the night of the clafoutis incident when King-Lu insists they return to the cow for one more bowl of milk—and he and Cookie are discovered. There is an entire system of power out now for Cookie and King-Lu, and they cannot survive against it. During dinner, Chief Factor had intoned, “When one factors the loss of labor from the punished hand versus the gain of labor from those hands who witness the punishment, a stricter punishment can be the more advisable path. Even a properly rendered death can be useful in the ultimate accounting.” Reichardt pairs the speech with a 360-degree pan of the chief’s opulent home, showing us its weighty furniture, costly glass windows, and wait staff of Native Americans (overseen by the chief’s wife, played by Reichardt regular Lily Gladstone). American capitalism is built to protect men like this, and Cookie and King-Lu are outnumbered and outgunned.
Reichardt doesn’t pass judgment on the film’s moral question of whether Cookie and King-Lu should be able to keep the money they made from stolen means; what is more important than that initial choice is the subsequent exploration of the intensity of avarice. After initially splitting up to escape Chief Factor’s men, when King-Lu and Cookie reunite, they’re each relieved the other didn’t abandon them. But what they couldn’t anticipate is how what their cakes represented—the status of them—would add more fuel into the binary system of haves and have-nots in this little outpost. As the pair flees, they’re not alone: On their trail is Thomas (Jared Kasowski), a young man who works for Chief Factor and whose three appearances in “First Cow” make clear his own disenfranchised position. First, we see him in line for one of Cookie’s creations, waiting patiently for his turn before someone jumps in front of him and grabs the last cake. The stunned Thomas hears King-Lu encourage people to come back tomorrow—when the prices might be higher. With this scene, Reichardt reinforces the rigidity of class hierarchy: Cookie and King-Lu might not have much, but their production gives them power—more than what Thomas has. Later, when the pair arrive at Chief Factor’s with the clafoutis, Thomas watches them again. He’s not allowed inside the house, but they are—another division. And finally, the morning after, Thomas spots Cookie—and follows the friends undetected, rifle in his hand.
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The last moments of “First Cow” make clear to whom those skeletons belong. Cookie and King-Lu, exhausted from their flight, lay down together for a moment of rest. Cookie’s pastry skill serves as a final joke: “Why is a baker like a beggar? … They both need bread.” King-Lu’s recovered money sack, useless now, becomes a pillow. Somewhere nearby Thomas is watching, and waiting, with that rifle. And the dreams of both men are eventually snuffed out, their destroyers a moneyed upper class furious at being the victims of a far-lesser theft than they themselves are committing against the native occupants of this land, and a subjugated lower class mistaking as their enemy men far closer to them than the arrogant and aloof wealthy they serve.
“Maybe this time we can be ready for it. We can take it on our own terms,” King-Lu had said to Cookie while fantasizing a better life, but the lingering, sobering reminder of “First Cow” is that the Oregon Territory, the Old West, and America as a whole weren’t crafted by heralded exemplars of individual spirit. There was bloodshed, and brutality, and a reinforcement of the grinding capitalism that has rendered so many ruined and anonymous. Class mobility is a dream, and death is an inevitability. “No way for a poor man to start,” King-Lu says, and what comes to mind is a 2016 quote from Reichardt herself: “I can’t not be angry.” Existing in “First Cow” alongside the unlikely friendship between the preciously wholesome Cookie and the relentlessly tenacious King-Lu is a simmering disgust with who writes our history and who is forgotten by it, and the gentleness of Reichardt’s film is a decoration, not a disguise.