“Kelly Reichardt movies always starts with absences, voids, unknowns. A woman without a home or a past to which we have access. A lawyer without stability, a young woman without a social life, a woman without the love of her family. A western caravan with no past and no future. These are the terms on which maybe America’s greatest director not named Martin Scorsese stakes her vision. Behind you? A tantalizing unknown made of impatient body language and the wrinkles under eyes staring too hard into the distance. In front of you? Graves and a fog you can’t see through. First Cow, her latest western, starts with an empty map on either side of its hero. All around John Magaro’s Cookie is civilization. He’ll hear about the great Asian cities, the Northeast of America, London, Paris, but all he knows is the thin and treacherous path in front of him and for all it winds and dips and takes him to places he’s never seen, it’s a straight line to his grave, the second sight the film has to offer.
“Knowing our hero dies doesn’t, however, make it any harder to become heavily invested in his journey from where he meet him, unmoored in his life and in space and time, to his final resting place. Reichardt has drawn one of her best characters here, a man so gentle he can’t help but turn away from violence when he encounters it, and cower from it passively and silently when he himself is threatened by it. He is, in other words, too good for this world. And that makes him perfect for her world, a place of bumbling dreamers stalked by intense disappointment lurking behind every corner like a fox peering into a henhouse window.
“He meets his match in a host of men ejected from all those fancy places he hears about. The great cities of Europe and Asia have spat out Toby Jones’ voluptuous Chief Factor and Orion Lee’s enterprising and ironically named King-Lu. A king in name only, a king deposed, a man with a thousand ideas about how to get his kingdom back, and no capital and no idea how to make his dreams real. He’s like Cookie in that regard, which of course makes them perfect friends. Two dreamers, one who knows what every corner of the map hides, and one who only knows that out beyond what he can see with his own eyes lies some unknown fortune and vastness. Reichardt, the poet of claustrophobic majesty, knows that vastness is yet all that he sees. Her natural world teems with it, and it keeps everyone from straying too far from what we in the audience can make sense of. The world is theoretically limitless in her cinema, and the horizon is forbiddingly beautiful and wide, but the truth is her heroes never make it that far.
“First Cow is maybe her most concise work, thematically. Two guys think they can beat the system and can’t, and their failure is a foregone conclusion. And yet, there are the most surprises here. There’s the unexpected tenderness of Cookie’s nocturnal dialogue with the cow who may be his and King-Lu’s ticket out of the Pacific Northwest. There’s the glee of two Native American women finally left alone to talk when their husbands leave the room. There’s the sight of Robert Altman’s one-time mascot Rene Auberjonois festooned with a crow like death himself. There’s the easy rapport between our heroes, which lazily spreads across days, time happily lost to a good vibe and the joy of friendship. First Cow is just one of those little miracles we’ll thankfully always have. That we had to live without it all this time seems unthinkable, but that’s what Reichardt’s cinema is all about. Filling in those absences with feelings and sights that moments before had no name and no shape.”
Scout Tafoya is an author, filmmaker, critic and video essayist, creator of “The Unloved” on RogerEbert.com, the longest running series of video essays on the web. He’s the author of Cinemaphagy: On the Psychedelic Classical Form of Tobe Hooper, the director of several dozen feature films and he’s written for The LA Review or Books, The Village Voice, Film Comment and Nylon Magazine among others. He publishes new writing and videos several times a week at Patreon.com/honorszombie/.
Best Film - Top 25:
1. First Cow [179.5/16]
2. Lovers Rock [142/13]
3. David Byrne's American Utopia [114/10]
4. I'm Thinking of Ending Things [96/9]
5. Sound of Metal [86/8]
6. City Hall [85.5/7]
7. (tie) Da 5 Bloods [80/9]
7. (tie) Never Rarely Sometimes Always [80/9]
9. Nomadland [75/7]
10. Ma Rainey's Black Bottom [72/8]
11. Fourteen [71/9]
12. The Invisible Man [68/7]
13. Possessor [64.5/6]
14. Collective [61.5/6]
15. Martin Eden [59.5/6]
16. The Assistant [57/6]
17. Vitalina Varela [53.5/7]
18. (tie) Bacurau [53.5/5]
18. (tie) Beanpole [53.5/5]
20. Minari [53/7]
21. The Grand Bizarre [48/5]
22. Time [45/6]
23. (tie) Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets [44.5/4]
23. (tie) To the Ends of the Earth [44.5/4]
25. Soul [41/5]
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