First Cow Review
A loner and cook (John Magaro) has traveled west and joined a group of fur trappers in Oregon Territory, though he only finds connection with a Chinese immigrant (Orion Lee). The men collaborate on a business, although its longevity is reliant upon the participation of a wealthy landowner's prized milking cow.
NR
Runtime: 2 Hours and 2 Minutes
Production Companies: FilmScience, IAC Films
Distributor: A24
Director: Kelly Reichardt
Writer: Kelly Reichardt, Jonathan Raymond
Cast: John Magaro, Orion Lee, René Auberjonois
Release Date: March 6, 2020
Kelly Reichardt is back in the west and this time she’s taking you back to the colonial days in her latest feature First Cow, a comedy about an American and a Chinese immigrant on the Oregon Trail who become pals and start a cooking business together. Departing from her other dramatic works (and Michelle Williams, her longtime star), First Cow is surprisingly a comedy—a comedy in a format that only few filmmakers have done right.
Reichardt is a filmmaker that gives me mixed feelings. Wendy and Lucy depressed the shit out of me, Meek’s Cutoff bored the crap out of me and I had to cut it off, and Certain Women was decent to say the least. With First Cow, I feel like I got both the best and worst of her.
Reichardt has a huge hard-on for telling stories set during the 19th Century and this is another one of those efforts. She displays her passion and love for the era on screen with naturalistic settings via tracking shots, showcasing the landscape and small communities where settlers travel to and from. The costuming is significantly well done and Reichardt allows them to get dirty for authenticity. Seriously, everyone looks like garbage and hey, who was to say hygiene was important during the mid-1800s?
What fuels the picture is the chemistry between the lead duo, King-Lu and Cookie, and the fable-like adventure they embark on. Cookie is a lone, quiet man with a passion for cooking and a desire to start his own bakery. King-Lu is a wise and ambitious foreigner with a big personality and an impressive survival skill set. It's like putting an introvert and an extrovert together to find common ground without any reference to their differences at all and they become business partners and friends. Throughout the film, you witness the blossoming of a genuine friendship that is tender and heartwarming. Their friendship builds in a way that’s reminiscent of, say, a close friendship with someone from high school… or as an adult for that matter. It kind of reminded me of how I met my best friend Myan and how far we’ve come since then. She’s my business partner, my right hand, and also my best friend. So, all of those genuine emotions are present in the script and depicted amazingly on screen by John Magaro and Orion Lee. They have a similar dynamic to Phineas and Ferb in a way where King-Lu is the man of words and personality and Cookie is the man of few words and more action. He’s the brawn—and by brawn I mean the cook of the operation as he creates “oily cakes” aka dessert treats that the town is swept up by. They look so damn delicious too, like Krabby Patty kind of delicious. Hell, his oily cakes have the same impact as a Krabby Patty where the whole village gets really hyped up over them. And it’s all thanks to the cow.
Moooooooving on from that, the comedy, for what it’s worth, is really damn fully. The humor is light and kinda sparse during the first hour with many quiet moments in between, but when the jokes land, they’re effective. Maybe I’m wrong—and someone please call me out on this if I am—but with comedy being an uncharted territory for the filmmaker, I found it a bit refreshing for this to be as funny as it was. There’s rampant visual humor and running gags, bearing topics such as consumerism and capitalism that mileage hilarious bits with some memorable standout scenes. In its favor, it doesn’t try hard at all to be funny. It’s just subtle humor satirizing the nature of the environment. There are no crude or offensive jokes even though there’s a tightrope walk with the diverse groups present, but thankfully it doesn’t go that route. The film doesn’t have an official MPAA stamp, but First Cow is bound to be rated PG due to how tame and poetic it is… like Meek’s Cutoff.
Movies in the form of a vignette. This is a personal thing, but I’m not a fan of them. Only few movies seem to get it right, and when they do they’re too long. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is a good example of a film that chronicles two best buddies trying to navigate the world in a series of vignettes. Just like Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, it is excruciatingly long. In this film’s case there are about 53 minutes of slow vignettes. The friendship between the leads isn’t really established until the hour mark—an hour mark in a two-hour movie. While the first hour does establish the setting and the characters nicely, there isn’t much of a thread of a story and most of it felt pretty dull. It felt like I was having Meek’s Cutoff deja vu. Now, when Ki-Lung and Cookie do get together and their friendship kicks off, the cohesiveness punches in its belated card and the film finally gets exciting, delivering a fluent, fun, and thoroughly engaging fable that is poetic and heartwarming… but for God’s sake it takes a long while to get there.
Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow may be tediously slow-paced to its own detriment, but due to the strength of her incredible leads, the dynamic they share, and its humorous fable-like tale, this 19th Century western comedy is solid enough to be worth a watch.
Rating: 3/5 | 63%
