Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow is the latest in the director’s increasingly long line of mini-marvels. From Old Joy to Wendy And Lucy, Meek’s Cutoff and Night Moves, the writer-director has carved a distinct niche, exploring ideas around the nature of friendship, the struggles of rural people to make ends meet and our co-dependent relationship with nature. Co-written with long-time collaborator Jonathan Raymond, First Cow doesn’t particularly stake out new ground and perhaps lacks the ambition of her best work (Certain Women), but it is a beautifully rendered view of a touching camaraderie forged during the hardscrabble of frontier life.
In 1820s Oregon, Cookie (John Magaro) is a diffident chef for a bunch of fur trappers heading West. He encounters King-Lu (Orion Lee), a well-educated Chinese immigrant, buck-naked in a forest and on the run from some Russians who want to kill him. The pair become pals, split up and then, years later, start sharing a cabin together near a trading post. It’s at this point the title star turns up, the first cow in the territory, belonging to British landowner Chief Factor (Toby Jones), which sparks a moneymaking idea. Cookie, a trained baker so brilliant he would earn a Paul Hollywood handshake, observes that the dairy animal could provide the killer ingredient for a buttermilk biscuit. Lu sees a lucrative business opportunity, and so the pair start nocturnal visits to the estate, Cookie doing the milking, Lu on look-out duty. At the most basic level, First Cow is the most low-rent heist movie imaginable.
This is John Magaro’s show, turning in a superbly modulated turn as a gentle sad-sack with a gift.
If this all sounds like a recipe for low comedy, it isn’t. Reichardt plays the difficulties of 19th-century Oregon with a straight bat, confident that the dramatic stakes — will Chief Factor realise Cookie and King-Lu are making his new favourite delicacy out of milk stolen from his own heifer? — are strong enough to keep us interested. Reichardt makes it feel authentic and teeming with life, dotting the story with great faces and actors: Altman favourite René Auberjonois as a recluse, Ewen Bremner as a Scottish military blowhard with a yen for cribbage and, best of all, Jones, who plays the pompous aristocrat without ever falling into parody.
Reichardt’s passion for nature is the anti-Terrence Malick, down and dirty naturalism rather than airy-fairy lyricism. But she never loses sight of the people, cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt’s boxy 4:3 images providing a perfect proscenium for the flourishing friendship, a beautifully rendered rapport defined by compassion and charm. Testament to Reichardt’s ability to promote fresh talent, Orion Lee is terrific, by turns a believable, hardnosed entrepreneur driving the business and a warm-hearted confidant. But this is Magaro’s show, turning in a superbly modulated turn as a gentle sad-sack with a gift. In a quiet moment where they share their hopes and dreams for the future, you realise you are watching an unlikely, purely platonic love story to savour.