First Cow (2020)

Film: First Cow (2020)

Stars: John Magaro, Orion Lee, Rene Auberjonois, Toby Jones

Director: Kelly Reichardt

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Occasionally when you're watching movies, even a lot of them, you end up with blind spots, and while modern moviemaking has largely kept me from having these (I try to see at least 50-60 new movies each year, which is less than some on Film Twitter, but enough that you aren't a slouch in most fields), that doesn't mean I don't have any, and we're encountering one of them today: I have never seen one of Kelli Reichardt's movies.  I know they look good, and star actresses that I admire.  Many of them are lounging around my Netflix queue right now, waiting to get pulled off the bench.  But because she hasn't quite caught Oscar's attention (but always seems to have movies coming out during awards season), I seem to miss most of them.  That is not the case in 2020 as I hunt down any movie with the remotest amount of buzz to ensure I'm getting a proper snapshot before I do my (mid-January) lists, and so we are going to spend this morning with First Cow.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie starts in the present day, with a woman uncovering two bare skeletons, age indeterminate, and then we flash back to the 1820's, where Cookie Figowitz (Magaro) is a chef-for-fire with fur trappers in Oregon, and not a good one.  He quietly spends his time collecting elegant mushrooms while his angry trappers wonder why there isn't more food.  He meets a man named King-Lu (Lee), whom he befriends and after the trappers have gone, starts living with (there is no gay element here, but...use your imagination & you'll get there).  Cookie opines for better ingredients, as he's a pastry chef trapped in an 1820's body, and lo-and-behold the wealthy neighbor Chief Factor (Jones) has the first cow in the territory.  At night, Cookie sneaks out & milks the cow, using the milk to make biscuits & cakes, which they sell for a premium to the trappers.  They are eventually discovered by Chief Factor, who doesn't know they're stealing the milk, and he hires them to make a clafoutis to impress a visitor.  They do, but are that night found out by Factor when they're discovered milking the cow, and they run away.  Cookie is injured, so both men rest, not knowing they're being tracked, and are lying where the two bodies that opened the film were found.

Like I said, I'm not familiar with Reichardt's work, and so I don't know if this sort of offbeat plot is typical for her filmmaking style (I have read that First Cow isn't far from her normal oeuvre), but I liked it.  The movie is too slow in the opening scenes, but it picks up dramatically in the back-half, and the real friendship between the two men is great (both give solid performances).  

There's also something imaginative about a movie that has such an unusually low stake event (stealing milk from a cow), leading to something as violent as the death of two men (we are largely to assume that at least Lu dies by the hand of the tracker, and possibly Cookie as well (even if he's at death's door).  The movie's creative lens into this era & its hardship through the advent of something like cooking is ingenious.  I have been watching so much Food Network this year (stuck inside, y'all), and getting to see that passion & drive in a frontiersman provides the movie with such charm.  I went with three stars, but it's a high three; there is wit here, even if the first forty minutes are such a slog you'll consider turning off your television without trusting where Reichardt is headed.  I will definitely be seeing more of her work in the future.