First Cow

 Kelly Reichardt's First Cow is an exercise in cinema minimalism.  The picture, a kind of abstract Western, scrupulously suppresses information and perversely avoids dramatizing its subject matter.  The narrative proceeds by implication and suggestion.-- the viewer is forced to the labor of putting together the plot from bits and pieces.  Reichardt's minimalist approach to her material may seem highly realistic, except that she doesn't really bother to provide enough information to create an illusion of verisimilitude.  I don't want to give the impression that Reichardt is lazy or takes a slack approach to her material -- to the contrary, she is ruthlessly intentional about paring away context, back story, and explanation.  Most of what you will read about First Cow suggests that the picture is set in Oregon in the 1820's.  However, there is really nothing in the movie that fixes the location or period definitively -- the movie takes place somewhere in nondescript forests in the Pacific Northwest near a river at a time when a man can say confidently about the fur trade:  "The beaver here will last forever."  Reichardt has obviously researched period details to within an inch of their lives -- but she recognizes that it would not be hip to foist this information on the viewer and, so, we are left to develop our own theories about the events that the film documents.  

The plot is spare to the point of vanishing.  A young man is working as a cook for a group of fur traders.  They are lost and hungry and threaten the young man, Cookie; unless he finds them food, they will beat him up or worse.  Foraging in the woods, Cookie picks some mushrooms and, even, nets a salmon.  (The salmon scene is exemplary of Reichardt's approach to narration -- one of the thugs has made a dire threat that Cookie may be killed or abandoned unless he finds them food.  In this movie, this sort of thing always leads to some kind of brawl.  While the trappers are fighting, Cookie goes into the woods, sees a stream and notices salmon jumping.  He returns to the camp where the trappers are still fighting in a desultory way, locates a net, and, wading into the stream, catches a big fish.  At that point, the scene just ends -- we don't see him return to camp; the delight of his comrades at his catching the fish is never shown.  We don't see the fish eaten or cooked.  All of this is left to our imaginations -- an interesting strategy but a bit misguided, I think:  after all, we've bought a ticket to this movie because we believe Ms. Reichardt's imagination is significantly better and more developed than ours.  Therefore, it's a bit of a cheat to leave so many narrative strands implied but just dangling).  On one of his forays into the woods, Cookie finds a Chinese man hiding in his white union suit.  The Chinese man is called King Lu and he is fleeing from some Russians who have murdered his friend.  Cookie gives the man his coat and hides him under a bundle of furs on a travois that the men are dragging.  When they come to a river, King Lu jumps out from under the furs and swims across the stream vanishing into the woods.  Later, the fur traders reach a sort of fort, actually a fur-trading post, called a Factor.  (Chief Factor is also the name given to the British commander of this place.)  At the Factor, there's more brawling and Cookie encounters King Lu again.  He goes to King Lu's shanty, drinks whiskey with him, and becomes his close friend.  The Chief Factor, played by Toby Jones, has brought a beautiful Jersey cow to the trading post.  King Lu is an optimist and go-getter -- he dreams of setting up a hotel in San Francisco.  King Lu encourages Cookie, who is an accomplished baker, to steal milk from the Chief Factor's cow and use it to make "oily cakes", some kind of buttermilk biscuit.  The cakes are a big hit and the two men make lots of money selling them at the fort.  The Factor is impressed by the cakes and doesn't recognize that they are made from milk extracted from his cow.  He invites a sea captain to his house and engages Cookie to make a special berry tart for the gathering, a sort of cake that requires lots of milk.  The Factor is a nasty fellow who believes in cruel corporal punishment -- he has calculated that a severe flogging, although it destroys the laboring capacity of its victim, is more than recompensed by the increased production of others terrified by the punishment.  The Factor and his henchmen discover that Cookie and King Lu have been stealing milk by moonlight from his cow.  He sends out armed men to detain them, apparently for execution.  King Lu again escapes by swimming across the river.  Cookie (seemingly -- all of this is shot in the dark and unclear) falls off a cliff and is injured.  King Lu returns to the Factor to retrieve his profits, hidden in a tree.  Cookie is convalescing in some strange wood hutch where it is always dark and an elderly Indian seems to be performing some kind of slow-motion Tai chi just on the other side of the window.  The images are smeared and dark and it is hard to see where he is located or what is going on there.  (A documentary about making the film calls the place the "dream cottage" and notes that the lenses of the cameras were smeared with vaseline around their edges to secure the strange, blurred images in the shack.)  King Lu and Cookie are reunited and they flee through the night.  Cookie is clearly badly injured.  They are pursued by a young man with a gun, a customer disappointed when they ran out of the oily cakes and now working for the villainous Factor.  When Cookie is too weak to continue his flight, King Lu lays down beside him and the movie abruptly ends.  However, the film begins with a prologue set in the present.  In that short sequence, a woman with her dog is traversing a scrub land next to a big estuary.  (We see barges moving up and down the river.)  Her dog uncovers a skull and she ultimately disinters two skeletons lying side-by-side -- that is, bones arrayed in the general posture of King Lu and Cookie as they lay together in the woods in the night.)  From this, we conclude that the Factor's minions caught up with the men and killed them where they lay -- although, it's possible that Cookie, who may have sustained a skull fracture, has already died.   (The film's prologue seems an appendix from Reichardt's previous film Wendy and Lucy, a movie about a homeless girl who loses her dog.  The girl's discovery of the relatively intact skeletons, of course, is unrealistic -- I think most people who uncovered a skull in a midden heap would likely immediately call the authorities.)

The film is too abstract to engender any strong feelings although I will say that, in  retrospect, there's a powerful element of tragedy in the picture -- King Lu and Cookie are both appealing characters and the Chinese man, in particular, is a real hustler; he's full of clever schemes to make money and, undoubtedly, would have had a bright future except for the contretemps with the Chief Factor.  Despite it's rigorous and highly disciplined mise-en-scene, the film is full of oddities that defy explanation:  for instance, why wouldn't the baker and his friend simply have asked permission to milk the cow for buttermilk for the pastries?  (The profits could then have been shared with the Chief Factor.) This would have made far more sense than the nocturnal visits to the cow tethered only a hundred yards from the Factor's house.  In one scene, Cookie is brought out to the cow by the Factor and inexplicably comes close to the beast -- the handsome cow is pleased to see him and, of course, nudges him with her head:  shouldn't Cookie have known that the cow would give some signs that she knew him, traces of enthusiasm that the Factor and his thugs would have noticed?  The two skeletons are found on a beach near a big tidal estuary.  But we last see the two men resting on a hill above a picturesque mountain river.  Has the landscape changed that much in the last 200 years?  There are all sorts of little implausibilities:  for instance, Cookie gets some nice boots (of which he seems very proud) but later at the fort we see him heedlessly walking through a mud puddle.  Would he really not take some care to protect his boots?  Normally, this sort of incongruity would be invisible but Reichardt's minimalist style, a way of film making that requires that you attend to every nuance of the image, foregrounds these sorts of mistakes.  

The movie is obviously a homage, at least in part, to McCabe and Mrs. Miller.  In both movies, an aggressive, if dullwitted, entrepreneur develops an enterprise that makes him wealthy on the remote frontier.  (McCabe ran a brothel; Cookie runs a bakery).  Both men run afoul of the powers that be and are killed. Reichardt in the "making of" documentary that accompanies the film on the Blu-Ray disc notes that she hired Rene Aubernojois,  a prominent figure in McCabe and Mrs. Miller to appear in a cameo (he's a gruff old curmudgeon with a raven on his shoulder) to invoke Altman's great Western.  The film also adopts some of the pictorial style of Altman's movie -- more than half of the film is shot in the dark (some of it "day-for-night") and many of the images are so dim as to be unintelligible.  The scenes in the "ghost cottage" in particular are very shadowy and full of oozing green blur.  Reichardt's tactic of suppressing information extends to the way the movie is made.  There are never any establishing shots.  The camera remains very tightly clasped to those things that it shows.  When there is a brawl, Reichardt cuts away -- she's not interesting in any sort of physical violence.  The Factor apparently lives in an impressive house, but we never see it except fragmentarily and the position of the house vis a vis where the cow is tethered is unclear.  The Factor is full of exotic people but we don't learn anything about them -- it turns out (I discover from the credits) that both the sea captain and the Factor are married to Hawaiian women and there are a number of "Sandwich islanders" in the camp.  (The camp is also full of Scotsmen in berets, Irishmen, freed slaves and Tillamook Indians.)  Reichardt's actors mumble and are frequently very hard to understand -- she is an alumnus of the "mumblecore" school of directing.  Landscape elements that are fundamental to the action are obscure:  for instance, we can't figure out whether a canoe is going upstream or downstream in several shots showing the vessel.  Reichardt's camera focuses intently on people performing quotidian tasks -- weaving baskets or cooking biscuits in hot oil.  King Lu has a wicker mat on which he lies when he and his friend sit by the river dreaming of the future.  

Reichardt uses long takes and the film is very slow.  I found it interesting but I think the picture would try the patience of many viewers.  There are some scenes that I thought very suspenseful -- some of the sequences involving milking the cow in the dark and the scene in which the animal shows her pleasure at meeting Cookie in the daylight are actually thrilling in a low-key kind of way.  The movie flourishes better in your memory than while you are watching it.  In fact, to paraphrase a criticism of Wagner, the movie is quite a bit better than it looks.