COIN OF THE REALM
KELLY REICHARDT’S DECEPTIVELY MODEST EPIC First Cow opens with a wide, static shot of a barge, heavy with consumer goods, pushing down the Columbia River. As the ship moves across the screen, the contrast between the rust, paint, and metal, and the surrounding wilderness, a network of leafless, winter branches skirting the wide water, becomes more and more pronounced. The endlessly complex ecosystem is, for the strangely inhuman vessel, a commercial shipping route, nothing more nor less. Like the story that follows, this shot is deceptively straightforward, gesturing toward one of the themes—nature vs. society, with the human being somewhere in-between—that the filmmaker has been worrying since her 1994 debut, River of Grass, itself set in the liminal landscape of the Florida Everglades. With First Cow, Reichardt has managed to weave together the various concerns—social, philosophical, economic, and cinematic—that have haunted her films to date, producing a work of remarkable beauty and startling complexity.
tells the story of two men living on the margins of frontier-era Oregon—the very limit of American civilization—who become first friends and then—Reichardt rewinds from the present day to the early 19th century. As the camera floats through the dense brush of the Pacific rainforest, a man dressed in the tattered rags of a trapper gently plucks chanterelles from the underbrush. It’s a bucolic scene, with soft harp music drifting on the soundtrack, the forest portrayed as a magical, innocent place. The man, a cook named Otis “Cookie” Figowitz (John Magaro), is completely at ease in this green world, at one point carefully righting an overturned newt, setting the creature back on its way. Cookie, as we come to learn, is interested not in merely exploiting nature for its “comestibles” (as one character puts it later) but also in existing as one small part of the ecosystem. His integration—down to his decomposing clothes—in that world seems complete, until he suddenly hears a twig snap underfoot nearby and runs in a panic back to camp, where he rejoins a crew of rough-looking trappers.
