New York Film Festival 57 Screenings 1

First Cow (Kelly Reichardt)
Coming after Certain Women (2016), certain to land on my decade top ten list, First Cow was bound to disappoint. In fact, it may be Reichardt's worst film to date which still makes it a quite fine film indeed. Adapted from Jon Raymond's novel The Half-Life, First Cow observes the blossoming of an unlikely friendship between a dirt-encrusted cook, Cookie (John Magaro), and a Chinese sailor, King Lu (Orion Lee), in 1820s Oregon. Cookie plays Walter Brennan to the more enterprising King Lu, arranging flowers and sweeping as the two set up house (or, more precisely, barely standing cabin). They seem destined to wind up totally lost to history until they hit on a money-making scheme - selling fried dough made with milk stolen from the area's first cow to the inhabitants of a muddy settlement.

"History isn't here yet," says King Lu, conveying the film's theme with a helpful concision. And yet, that very compactness turns out to be the problem with First Cow - it all feels a bit too pat, too obvious. Missing are those poetic ellipses that allow us to di(v)e into Reichardt's films, e.g., the delicate, porous Michelle Williams section of Certain Women. As the two principals try to make a name for themselves in a burgeoning (and white) America, the film takes on the conventional shape of a heroic narrative, decidedly not Reichardt's forte. Still, this is a brave attempt to snatch the writing of history from the capitalist victors, here, in the form of Toby Jones' representative of English landed gentry from whom Cookie and King Lu steal the milk. The central friendship is etched with a moving intimacy; in the Q & A, Reichardt explained that she shot the film in Academy ratio and avoided grand long shots of the wilds in order to highlight the closeness of the two buddies. And the secondary characters do provide those poetic ellipses, especially a lost-looking René Auberjonois and the incomparable Lily Gladstone.
Grade: B+