The Wall Street Journal - 06.03.2020

A10| Friday, March 6, 2020 THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.

Mrs. Clinton’s 2016 race for the

presidency is recounted in the fi-

nal episode, there are the pictures

to bring it all home.

This story began not long be-

fore Election Day, when word came

of a breathtakingly strange twist

in the tortuous saga of the Clinton

emails. Some of these had been

discovered on the personal laptop

of former Democratic Rep. An-

thony Weiner—remember him?—

whose taste for emailing sexually

explicit pictures of himself to un-

derage girls had made news

around the world, and not only be-

cause he was a member of Con-

gress. He was, in addition, the hus-

band of Mrs. Clinton’s longtime

top aide, Huma Abedin, who was,

as another member of the Clinton

team describes it, nearly out of

her mind with grief over the

emails on her now-estranged hus-

band’s laptop: yet another threat

to the campaign.

Mrs. Clinton’s response to the

mess is to put aside worries about

the campaign to concentrate on

comforting the distraught woman.

She insists on everyone having

ice-cream sundaes, a directive en-

thusiastically received by glum

staff members who get the idea

and begin organizing amusements.

There they all sit on the campaign

plane, the pictures show, deter-

minedly cheerful, their candidate

in their midst.

It’s an incident in keeping with

the dauntless and confident char-

acter that emerges from this por-

trait of Hillary Clinton, who with-

stands endless interrogations

about her use of a personal com-

puter while secretary of state—no

use pointing out that Colin Powell

had done the same. And about her

destroyed emails and other alleged

high crimes, including dereliction

of duty in the Benghazi terror at-

tack. The accusations about her

BARBARA KINNEY/HULU

IF IT OFFEREDnothing else, “Hil-

lary” (Friday, Hulu) would merit

honors for the remarkable frank-

ness of this four-part chronicle of

Hillary Clinton‘s life, career and

marriage—a buoyant history, its

gut-wrenching aspects notwith-

standing. It’s difficult to think of

any film that speaks to our mo-

ment as strikingly as this docu-

mentary does, a quality evident

early on.

Here’s Mrs. Clinton, battling

Bernie Sanders for the 2016 nomi-

nation, which requires slogging

around wintry New Hampshire. It’s

a place that’s not been particularly

receptive to her before, but she’s

not ready to leave the field—she

never is. Amid the crowds, she’s

confronted by a group of teenage

girls hurling questions, one of

whom challenges her to say

whether she would “pledge to ban

fracking like Bernie Sanders.”

She would not, comes the an-

swer. “A president cannot ban

fracking. That’s not the way our

system works,” she tells the girls.

This consideration doubtless

came as news to her young audi-

ence, aware only of the vital im-

portance of banning fracking, as

Sen. Sanders had pledged to do.

Mrs. Clinton left unsaid, at least

here, her views on Sen. Sanders’s

grasp of the requirements of our

system, though the point of her

answer hung nicely in the air.

As “Hillary” shows, she can be el-

oquent on the matter of Sen. Sand-

ers’s capacities and general charac-

ter. In one scene she holds forth on

the subject at length—though noth-

ing equal to the venom, charges of

corruption, and accusations of tak-

ing money from Wall Street he di-

rects at her daily, generous footage

of which the film provides.

Then there are the Bernie devo-

tees shown disrupting Mrs. Clin-

ton’s speeches at her rallies. About

this, a member of the Clinton team

thoughtfully tells the filmmaker,

“there’s an underlying vitriol in

some percentage of the Bernie

supporters.”

There’s a touch of discovery in

his tone that would likely not be

there now. The vitriol of some per-

centage of Bernie’s supporters is,

today, too established a fact to

cause wonderment.

None of this is to say that the

powers of this work (filmmaker,

Nanette Burstein) are rooted

mainly in political battles—though

the impact of the up-close treat-

ment of the campaigns, delivered

via a remarkable stock of footage,

can’t be underestimated. When

one of the more bizarre events of

TELEVISION REVIEW| DOROTHY RABINOWITZ

‘Hillary’: Inside the Campaign

A24 FILMS (3)

John Magaro as Cookie Figowitz with Evie the cow, above; Orion Lee as King-

Lu, left; a scene from ‘First Cow,’ directed by Kelly Reichardt, top

emails, though, would have an en-

during life all their own, much like

a conspiracy theory of an espe-

cially irresistible kind.

You can be investigated again

and again, she muses in the film,

and be found innocent of any

wrongdoing, but the accusations

remain, they live on always. She

speaks without rancor—it’s the

statement of a hard fact she’s ac-

customed to.

She’s become accustomed, too, to

a view of her as hard, untrust-

worthy, conniving and generally

reprehensible. She’s presented with

this question in the film: How is it

that people go around talking about

their intense hatred of Hillary Clin-

ton but, when asked what it is they

hate, they have no answer?

Neither does she, and it’s clearly

not a matter that disturbs her.

One of her aides contributes a

possible clue—this about all the

women she met who expressed

bitter resentment of Mrs. Clinton

for staying with the husband who

had so betrayed her. This would

not, of course, explain all the men

who express hatred of Mrs. Clinton

yet find it impossible to say why—

as opposed to those who claim to

have come upon proof that she’s a

master criminal.

All of this is too complicated to

blame on gender bias. But the

film’s scenes of howling males

shouting as Mrs. Clinton addresses

crowds during her first presiden-

tial primary contest; the signs

reading “Hillary, Iron My Shirt”;

the TV comedian displaying a fun

item called “The Hillary Nuts

Cracker”; and complaints about,

for instance, the pain of having to

listen regularly to a woman’s voice

are in their hellish way priceless

and not to be missed.

The same goes for all four hours

of this never less than mesmeriz-

ing film.

Hillary

Friday, Hulu

Barack Obama chats with Hillary

Clinton backstage after a campaign rally

reptitiously wise. Cookie has the

skill while King-Lu has the mer-

cantile impulse. Together they

constitute a start-up venture,

based on theft, that swings be-

tween shrewdness and folly, daring

and greed. Seldom does a small

film with laconic dialogue have so

much to say, indirectly, about busi-

ness, human nature and history.

And so much to show—a mingling

of whites, blacks, Native Ameri-

cans and Asians, most of them

working at tasks, making things,

scratching out livings, forging a fu-

ture they can’t imagine. “History is

coming but it isn’t here yet,” King-

Lu says. It’s the frontier life

summed up in a sentence, in a film

that’s too lovely for words.

Cow” is bright and funny until it

turns dark. Unlike the prospectors

who struck gold in the Yukon de-

cades later, Cookie and King-Lu

strike milk from Evie’s udders. It’s

the crucial ingredient in the bis-

cuits and so-called oily cakes that

Cookie whips up as if by magic, de-

licious delicacies that tickle dulled

palates in a populous trading post.

“I sense opportunity here,” King-Lu

tells hispâtissier. Both of them

sense danger, since the bovine’s

owner, a wealthy landowner played

by Toby Jones, doesn’t know

they’re pilfering Evie’s precious

bodily fluid, though he’s starting to

wonder why his prized possession

isn’t more productive.

All of this is delightful, and sur-

S

ome movies feel dead

from the first shot, with

or without star power,

spectacular vistas or the

false energy of hurtling

pace. “First Cow” is viv-

idly alive on arrival and grows into

pure enchantment, although it

starts at a saunter and its physical

scale is small. (Even before the

lights go down the old-fashioned

shape of the nearly square screen

announces that visual grandeur

won’t be on the agenda.)

Kelly Reichardt’s vision of fron-

tier life circa 1820 summons up a

real cow, a wide-eyed creature

named Evie who’s been shipped

north from California to become

the first of her species in the Ore-

gon Territory, where several of Ms.

Reichardt’s previous features were

set. Evie makes her rather stately

entrance on a Columbia River

barge, then turns into a cash cow

for a couple of scruffy wanderers

after they meet in a forest by

chance and become friends and

business partners. The film, photo-

graphed luminously by Christopher

Blauvelt, is mainly but not only

about friendship, a beguiling fable

of harshness and kindness with a

haunting afterglow.

If you’re familiar with this film-

maker’s work you know she hasn’t

been big on conventional dramat-

ics. In the 2008 “Wendy and

Lucy” a young drifter, accompa-

nied by her Labrador mix, gets

stuck in small-town Oregon on her

way to Alaska in search of a job.

Most of the action consists of

Wendy losing Lucy, then searching

for her all over town. In “Meek’s

Cutoff,” a minimalist epic from

2010, three families in a wagon

train move slowly toward Oregon;

the essentially inward drama

turns on whether the pioneers’

mountain-man guide can be

trusted or is leading them astray.

In “First Cow” the suspense

builds slowly and subtly,

but then inexorably to

a level that’s new for

Ms. Reichardt;

what’s at stake is

the fate of two

immensely lik-

able men in

heedless pursuit

of elusive success.

One of them,

Cookie Figowitz

(John Magaro), has

been on the move for

most of his life. He’s a cook, as

his nickname implies, and a really

good one, as it develops. But he

can’t do much for the half-starved

band of fur trappers he’s traveling

with because they’re trudging

across a land that offers little

nourishment. Cookie is one of the

most touching characters to have

graced the screen in a very long

time, someone you take instantly

to your heart. That’s due to Mr.

Magaro’s poignant, exquisitely nu-

anced performance, Ms. Reich-

ardt’s direction and Jon Ray-

mond’s screenplay, which he and

the director adapted from his

2008 debut novel, “The Half-Life.”

Cookie’s goodness shows in deeds

and words. Walking through the

woods, he finds a little lizard stuck

on its back and stops to turn it

over. Milking Evie—illicitly, in the

dead of night—he talks to her

soulfully, intimately, unselfcon-

sciously: “Sorry about your hus-

band. I hear he didn’t make it all

the way.” (The film is en-

hanced by William Ty-

ler’s distinctive score.)

Cookie’s new

friend, King-Lu, is

played by Orion

Lee, a quietly char-

ismatic actor with

an economical style

and a mellifluous

voice. Mr. Lee man-

ages to make the inex-

plicable seem plausi-

ble—that a penniless

Chinese-born sailor of great elo-

quence and sophistication should

be hiding, buck naked, in a clump

of vegetation after running for his

life from a bunch of murderous

Russians. Cookie gives him shelter,

and good fellowship as well. Be-

fore long the two men are collabo-

rating in the most intriguing por-

trayal of nascent capitalism since

Robert Altman’s 1971 “McCabe &

Mrs. Miller,” a brooding, rain-

swept masterpiece that’s also set

in the Pacific Northwest.

The emotional weather of “First

FILM REVIEW| JOE MORGENSTERN

‘First Cow’: Making

Magic From Milk

LIFE&ARTS