Ryan McNeil
When so much in life seems uncertain, the smallest things can provide great solace. Our lives can become games with very long odds, and history might seem poised to pass us by. Get smacked down enough times, it becomes really tempting to stay down. It’s in these moments that these “small things” often arrive. Small things like a friendly face or a reminder of home. It could come by way of the sun breaking through the clouds or a a swallow of something sweet and succulent.
Such emotional lifts are invaluable, but often rare. They are like finding a gold nugget in a muddy creek, or spotting a single cow wandering well away from its paddock.
After brief a modern-day preface, FIRST COW takes us back to 19th Century Oregon.
A band of trappers are making their way through the untamed frontier, with a cook tagging along for the ride (John Magaro). His given name is Figowitz, but everyone just calls him “Cookie”. He works with what he can find, never taking more than what the land around him offers. The trappers often belittle him for his naturalistic approach to their dinners, but Cookie is steadfast in his convictions.
One night he comes across a Chinese wanderer named King-Lu. He claims to be on the run from Russians, and he leans on Cookie’s kindness for a moment or two of shelter from the storm. Soon, King-Lu disappears again, but the two men reconnect when they are both passing through a trading post. It’s there that they realize they have a similar world view, and a combined passion for cooking. They would like to get in on the opportunity that 19th Century America seems to be offering, but as King-Lu underlines, opportunities for men like them require a great piece of luck, or a small piece of lawlessness.
As fate would have it, the men get a dose of both.
They soon realize that they are camping a stone’s throw away from a wealthy landowner named Factor (Toby Jones), and that Factor’s cow is left largely untended at night. Cookie and King-Lu know the world of difference just a cup or two of milk will make in a batch of batter and soon they are stealing away into the night to pay the prized bovine a visit.
The plan works. Soon they are setting up a kiosk in the trading post to sell honey-drizzled “Oily Cakes”, making a tidy sum for their wares. There is talk of moving south and setting-up proper shop; not with hopes of striking it rich, but just to earn their own keep.
But with their enterprise depending on such a small margin of error, one false move can be disastrous.
FIRST COW is a masterpiece of subtlety.
Kelly Reichardt is a maestra filmmaker whose films are an incredible blend of high stakes, human longing, and natural riches. It’s truly possible that her visual palette contains more shades of green than most people even knew existed. She has the heart of a working-class hero, knowing how to capture the simplest pursuits in ways that make them seem like a quest for El Dorado.
With FIRST COW, Reichardt uses all of these talents to maximum effect. She opens our hearts when we see the sweet smiles that follow a taste of something sweet, and she makes our blood run cold when we see a familiar face holding a weapon. We are led slowly down the wooded path, under a dense canopy. On this journey it gets difficult to find the light, but when the sun does come out it is glorious. Soon, we are reminded why we ventured out in the first place.
One cannot help but be struck by the type of men that stand at the centre of FIRST COW. Tales of The American Frontier are usually tales of alpha adventurers: hunters, trappers, explorers, killers. It is untamed land and only untamed men could earn a story by making their mark on it. Here though, we witness two men who the aforementioned alphas look down on. Cookie and King-Lu are soft-spoken “others”. Where most men of the day are hunters, they are gatherers. Their ambitions are much nobler, and they don’t feel a need to leave a trail of blood behind them to achieve them.
These are the sorts of men that we should be telling tales about. Not the conquerors, but the caretakers. They are surrounded by men who would plunder the land for their own gains, and yet they want no part of such exploitation. They know there is more to life than dominance and ownership. They are only hoping for an edge, not for exploitation.
What we witness in FIRST COW is pride in one’s labours. The men who line-up for King-Lu and Cookie’s works would dearly like them to make more cakes than they do. However, that would mean pushing their luck and getting greedy, and neither cook is willing to take the risk. It’s a lesson in austerity: The difference between care in limited supply and greed in mass production.
There is pride and poetry in offering creativity, comfort, and communion. Life can seem so hard and cold sometimes – either because there is too much happening all around, or nothing at all. Taking a bite of a delight that has been cooked with care for us can spark feelings of joy and gratitude. Those feelings come from care in the creation, and pride in the process. FIRST COW celebrates the joy of all those details fully: the cooking and the consumption. We’re reminded that the smile garnered from chewing the biscuit is matched by the satisfaction the baker got from finding the perfect alchemy.
As FIRST COW has arrived into a world so on edge. The state of things prevents us from gathering in one dark room and giving ourselves over to the tender intricacies of this film and gaining its full effect. Still, it has come to comfort us – to offer us something warm, delicious, and hand-crafted. It remembers the very best things about the world that was…and reminds us that we will get back there again someday.