'First Cow': A Profound, Ruminative Western
Two men struggle to eke out a living in the Oregon Territory by stealing the milk of a wealthy landowner in writer-director Kelly Reichardt's film.
writer-director Kelly Reichardt's seventh feature and her fifth collaboration with novelist/screenwriter John Raymond, is as rich and melancholy an expression of the themes that have defined her career as one could ask. It's another unhurried, keenly drawn excerpt of subsistence living in the Pacific Northwest, with the savage mandate of survival butting up against the "civilized" — the quotation marks are Reichardt's — forces of capitalism. Any expectations based on or her harrowing western prove correct: You'll need to slow your breathing to sync up, or more likely, with the movie's tempo, but Reichardt rewards your patience with a profound experience that lingers in memory.
