the washington post.
friday, march 13, 2020EZ28
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Swallow
A newlywed woman
descends into
increasingly
extreme self-harm.
30Saint Frances
After an abortion, a
troubled young
woman befriends a
6-year-old girl. 30Plus
Common sense
media 33Opening next
weekEmily Blunt stars in
the horror sequel A
Quiet Place Part II.Javier Bardem plays
a man with
dementia reliving
his life in his mind in
The Roads Not
Taken.Two teenage girls,
one pregnant, travel
to new york City in
Never Rarely
Sometimes
Always.To carry off a heist, a
police officer must
teach himself a
secret language of
whistling in the
Romanian crime
thriller The
Whistlers.A teacher brings
lacrosse to inuit
high school
students in The
Grizzlies.and their humble struggles
against the spiny backdrop of the
pine trees that threaten to engulf
them (not to mention the equally
imposing men trying to make
their own more violent way). For
Cookie and King Lu, dreams are
tender things to be nurtured; for
their cohorts, they can only be
realized by seizing them by force.
Accompanied by a gentle gui-
tar and mandolin score by Wil-
liam Ty ler, “First Cow” isn’t a
happy movie — in fact, it’s often
brutal, and the present-day image
that bookends the story suggests
it won’t have an optimistic end-
ing. Still, nestled within Reich-
ardt’s jaundiced portrait of greed,
racism and nativism at its most
dishonest and chauvinistic, Cook-
ie and King Lu’s f riendship stands
as a reminder that America’s most
pitiless trajectory didn’t neces-
sarily have to be that way. As a
parable of Bressonian purity,
“First Cow” offers a clear-eyed
assessment of how we got here; as
a magnificent, moving example of
Reichardt’s uncompromising vi-
sion, it doesn’t just deliver a cri-
tique, but transcendence.
[email protected]First Cow
Allyson Riggs/A24 FilmsPG-13. At area theaters. Contains brief strong language. 122 minutes.BY ANN HORNADAYTo watch a Kelly Reichardt
movie is to enter a kind of trance.
Over a quietly extraordinary 25-
year career, which includes bona
fide masterpieces like “Old Joy”
and “Meek’s Cutoff,” Reichardt
has formed a visual and aural
language all her own, a symbolic
system rooted in nature, silence,
steadily propulsive movement
and discreet character study that
upends viewers’ expectations,
and ultimately, their entire cine-
matic experience. We might go
into a Kelly Reichardt movie
thinking we’ll be told a story, but
we emerge with our conscious-
ness subtly and radically altered.
Reichardt’s new film “First
Cow,” indeed tells a story — a
ripping good yarn, actually —
while it retunes the sensibilities
of spectatorship. On its face, this
simple tale, set in the Oregon
territory in the early 19th century,
couldn’t be more fablelike, up to
and including the majestic, if not
literally magical bovine creature
at its center. But, like most of
Reichardt’s films, this one con-
tains multitudes. We m eet Cookie
(John Magaro in a soulful, waryA transcendent frontier parable
performance) when he is in the
wilderness with a bunch of unruly
beaver trappers, his gentle tem-
perament at odds with their
coarse, alpha-male aggression.
Then Cookie meets King Lu (Ori-
on Lee), a Chinese immigrant
eager to find his fortune in a land
of mythically endless possibility
but already being organized into
a rigid class and caste system.
(“History hasn’t gotten here yet,”
King Lu says prophetically.) Set-
ting up housekeeping just outside
the Royal West Pacific Trading
Post, Cookie and King Lu embark
on the kind of scheme that either
builds empires or ends in tears,
their idealism tempered by cruel
realities already coalescing
around ideas of race, capitalism,
manifest destiny and manhood
itself.
And yes, there is a cow in “First
Cow,” a gorgeous, brown-eyed
creature imported to the settle-
ment by the overweening Chief
Factor, played by To by Jones with
just the right mix of imperious-
ness and insecurity. Reichardt’s
most ardent fans won’t be sur-
prised that her affinity for ani-
mals (especially dogs) extends to
the latest installment of her oeu-
vre, which continues to explore
her cardinal themes and deepen
her most fruitful collaborations.
This is the fifth Reichardt film
written by Jon Raymond, who
wrote the novel “The Half-Life”
on which it is based; and it contin-ues their mutual fascination with
excavating Oregon and its history.
In some ways, “First Cow” could
be considered a prequel to 2010’s
“Meek’s Cutoff,” w hich chronicled
the journey of Eastern settlers
through the state’s forbidding
high desert. “First Cow” explores
the creation of the ideals they
were chasing before they were
formed into an ideology: The
trading post is a cosmopolitan,
polyglot place, filled with immi-
grants from around the globe and
tended to by members of native
tribes who are already being dis-
persed, marginalized and forcibly
assimilated.
And, like “Meek’s Cutoff,” “ First
Cow” has been exquisitely shot by
cinematographer Christopher
Blauvelt, who once again uses a
4:3 aspect ratio to give the action
an archaic, squared-off frame. In
the previous film, Reichardt not-
ed that the tighter field of vision
subverted the expanses of classic
Westerns to reflect the point of
view of the settlers themselves,
who couldn’t see past their own
personal horizons; here, it gives
Cookie and King Lu’s l ife together
both intimacy and painterly
beauty. In contrast to the vertical-
ity of the similarly mud-soaked
“McCabe & Mrs. Miller,” with its
scaffolding and soaring ambi-
tions, “First Cow” is adamantly
horizontal. Reichardt sets her
sights low, the better to capture
her hard-scrabbling protagonistsKelly Reichardt’s film is
consciousness-alteringOrion Lee, left, as King
Lu and John Magaro as
Cookie in “First Cow,”
which does, in fact,
feature the bovine
creature.UPLOADED BY "What's News" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws