Mark Reviews Movies: FIRST COW

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 12, 2020

Co-writer/director Kelly Reichardt's First Cow begins in the present. A freighter travels down a river. A dog sniffs at the ground. The canine's owner follows it. The dog comes across something, and the owner takes a look. It's a human skull, partially buried in the dirt.

She starts digging. The river keeps flowing, although the ship now traveling down it looks slightly out of place in this era. With the woman's digging complete, she takes a moment to look up at some birds singing in the trees, as they have done long before she was alive. They might have been singing when the two people, whose skeletons she has just uncovered, lived in this place and died, lying next to each other, at this spot.

We expect that Reichardt and Jonathan Raymond's screenplay (based on the latter's novel The Half-Life) will solve the mystery of skeletons—how they wound up here, buried together in a shallow and seemingly accidental grave, and, more importantly, how they died. Undoubtedly, the story leads us to a point at which we can mostly deduce what happened to these people—but only just to that point.

There isn't a definitive answer, and in a way, that's both fine and appropriate. It spares us the potentially dreadful knowledge of the specifics of the characters' inevitable deaths, and it also leaves us contemplating something far more important. It's not how these men died that matters. It's how they lived.

The rest of the story takes place in the early 1800s, in some unspecified northern territory of the United States. One could dive deeper into the history of the period or look to Raymond's source material to get some more specific details, but ultimately, they're unimportant. This is a place without any history, as one of the men who eventually will be forgotten by and unknown within history says. "It's coming," he continues, "but maybe, this time, we can take it on our terms."

Such are the ambitions of humanity—to make some kind of mark that will be remembered beyond one's life. Watching as Otis "Cookie" Figowitz (John Magaro) and King-Lu (Orion Lee) try to leave their own mark on the world, we're fully aware of the dramatic irony of their situation. They, like so many people who lived hundreds of thousands of years ago and live now and will live until some unknown time in the future, are destined to be forgotten. Under these circumstances, it's probably for the best that we don't see their actual deaths. Their death within the grand scope of human history is more than enough of an existential punch.

Cookie is, as his nickname suggests, a cook for a group of "lesser" fur traders, hunting for beavers before the animal's fur goes out of fashion (By the way, it does, at least in Paris, before the story ends, just as a reminder of how fickle history can be). Along the way back to a nearby fort, Cookie discovers King-Lu, who has come from China to make his fortune, naked and hiding in the forest. Some Russians are out to murder him, he fears, because he shot at one after they gutted his friend, accused of stealing, in front of him.

Cookie offers him a blanket, a spot in his tent to sleep, and passage to the fort, hidden among the trappers' belongings. Before reaching that destination, though, King-Lu has to evade being found and swims up-river toward somewhere—anywhere.

They're reunited at a local tavern, and King-Lu offers Cookie a drink back at his cabin. King-Lu has some ideas to make money and start some kind of business, but the arrival of the first cow to the territory, combined with Cookie's knowledge of baked goods, gives them a more solid idea about how to make money now, in order to start some kind of business later. All they have to do is steal some milk in the middle of the night, while avoiding the detection of the fur trade's chief factor (Toby Jones), and make some doughnuts to sell to traders and trappers at a high price.

For all of the existential dread that defines this story, it's very much in the moment, with Reichardt establishing the grinding sense of time and routine ordinariness of life at and near the fort. Once the plot, which has Cookie and King-Lu baking and selling their dairy-based treats right under the factor's nose, begins moving, the film almost veers into comedic terrain. The business partners' scheme is so simple, so mundane, and so successful that we have to admire their gumption, their tenacity, and their audacity.

As for the main characters, they're broad but distinct types, with the kind Cookie even offering encouraging words to the cow, as it has seen some hardship to get this strange new place, and the ambitious King-Lu encouraging Cookie to continue the scam, even as they both realize they're pushing their luck. They're the kind of people who seemingly would be destined for some upstart triumph of business—if we didn't already know what's going to happen to them.

Admirably, Reichardt doesn't dwindle on or, for that matter, even really acknowledge the pair's inevitable fate (Some of King-Lu's plans and words of inspiration do, of course, possess the sad sting of irony). Despite its opening scene, the film isn't about death and doom. First Cow is too busy admiring these characters' determination, establishing their friendship, living with their hopes and dreams, and, even as their scheme quickly unravels, keeping us on their side in a last dash for survival. Death is constant, but life is a unique story worth the telling.

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