122 min | PG-13 | March 6, 2020 | A24
A wandering cook and a Chinese immigrant on the run go into business together in 1820s Oregon. Their product is a fried honey cake. Their supply chain is a rich man’s cow, milked in the dark, one quiet crime at a time.
Cookie Figowitz is a soft-spoken cook traveling through the Oregon Territory with a company of fur trappers who treat him with contempt. He meets King-Lu, a Chinese immigrant fleeing men who want him dead. The two drift into a partnership and then a friendship. They start selling fried honey cakes that draw a crowd, and the secret ingredient is milk they steal at night from the territory’s only cow. That cow belongs to Chief Factor, the wealthiest man in the region. First Cow is a frontier Western about the precise moment American capitalism begins, and it locates that moment in a quiet act of theft.
John Magaro plays Cookie with a gentleness that the frontier has no use for. He notices things. He rights an overturned newt, he sweeps a borrowed floor, he handles the stolen cow with apology in his hands. Orion Lee plays King-Lu as the engine of ambition, the one who sees the cakes as a business and the business as a ladder. Toby Jones plays Chief Factor as a vain Englishman who craves the taste of refinement and never suspects that his prized cow funds the men he patronizes. Lily Gladstone and Gary Farmer fill the margins with faces that make the settlement feel lived in rather than staged.
Kelly Reichardt directs from a script she wrote with Jonathan Raymond, adapting his novel. She frames the film in a boxed, nearly square ratio that hems the characters inside the forest and refuses them any horizon. The editing holds on small tasks until they accumulate weight, a hand milking, a cake frying, a man waiting in the dark. Reichardt opens the film in the present, with a woman unearthing two skeletons from the riverbank, and that image hangs over everything that follows. The sound design favors birdsong, wind, and the low presence of the animal over any swell of music. The score arrives in spare plucked notes that never push the emotion the film has already earned.
First Cow is a film about friendship, and it is also a film about the price of friendship inside an economy that has no room for it. Cookie and King-Lu build something tender out of stolen milk and borrowed time. The film never raises its voice about what it is doing. It simply shows two gentle men trying to get a foothold in a country that rewards the ruthless. The cow is the first of its kind in the territory, and so is the theft, and so is the dream of more. Reichardt understands that America starts here, in the mud, with a good man holding a pail he has no right to.