First Cow movie review & film summary (2020)
“First Cow,” adapted by Reichardt with frequent collaborator Jonathan Raymond from the latter’s novel The Half Life, is many things. A simultaneously gentle and unsparing dissection of the formative flaws of capitalism, and thus of the “American dream”; a frontier story which captures the harsh realities and simple pleasures of a life built painstakingly from rock, wood, and soil; a heist movie; an argument for the power of baked goods. It is somehow both brutal and pastoral, peaceful and laced through with the inevitability of disaster and death. (Nothing fragile can hold forever—not a tree branch, not a ruse, not luck, and not peace, no matter what William Tyler’s beautiful, serene score might trick you into believing.) But above all else, it is a story of friendship, treated here as a haven and basic human need, as essential as water or bread. The film begins with a quote from William Blake’s “Proverbs of Hell”: The bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship. And those bones are, for the viewer as well as the woman (Alia Shawkat) who finds them, both an invitation and a door into that friendship.
When Cookie Figowitz (John Magaro, “The Big Short”) first encounters King Lu (Orion Lee, “A Brilliant Young Mind”), it’s in a moment that would, in most films, lead to a chase, gunshots, disaster. The bullied, forlorn cook for a group of rowdy prospectors making a slow journey west, Cookie is searching the woods for anything edible, anything at all. He finds mushrooms, but he also finds a man, naked and shivering, who calmly and quietly asks if the cook is about. The cook is about, and he does not scream, or pull a gun, or alert his brutish traveling companions. Instead, he offers food, warmth, shelter, and if he can manage it, safe passage. How it’s managed and what happens in those hours is mostly left to the imagination, and that’s true of much of “First Cow”; like the traveler in the woods who stumbles upon a story, you’re asked to fill in some blanks yourself.
One of those blanks exists between that first meeting and their second, when the fortunes of both men are somewhat reversed. The circumstances are very different, but the offer is the same: food, warmth, shelter, and this time, companionship. Cookie and King Lu begin to build a life side by side, rather than alone, fishing and building and working in affable silence. Reichardt shows us what both men want through the small choices they make: Cookie arrives at King Lu’s small, fragile cabin and immediately sets to work sweeping, tidying, gathering wildflowers to place in a small bottle on a smaller shelf. His friend encourages him, gently, to sit down, rest, and feel at home, but never tells him to stop in the way you might tell a guest to simply leave the dishes. Both seem to know that from that moment forward they are a pair, and through Lee and Magaro’s simple, quiet performances, we watch them build and cherish their new status quo.
