First Cow (2020)

Because you just can't make a good pastry without milk.  

Kelly Reichardt is, quite frankly, one of the best living US directors.  She does movies about small communities and stress and small joys and showing how all of that co-exists together, sometimes in tragedy and sometimes in beauty.   In addition, she doesn't ignore women, which is something you think directors to happen to also be women would be better about but, well, nobody is perfect.  While First Cow does not have women leads, unlike many Reichardt films, there are these small moments between women that highlight how good she is at handling this.

Sometime in maybe the mid-19th century (there is no explicit date) we come into a small town in the Pacific Northwest (at least by feel; again, this could be anywhere from northern California up through Vancouver) in the midst of gold fever and beaver hunting for pelts for fashionistas in New York and London.  It's a perfectly paced story that incorporates things like biscuit making and scones and honey and, well, the first cow in the area and the battle over the milk for making proper baked goods that aren't just hardtack and flour-water creations.   

So much of this movie is about...mood, and this sense of a supposed frontier (a frontier that only exists in the minds of the white people moving in, among them a fantastic Toby Jones and for once scary Ewan Bremner, not in the minds of the Cree who were already there).  It's a tiny dot in the middle of a foreboding forest, with only real house and one cow and people trying to do the best they can while also knowing that sometimes on a frontier, the rules just get fudged.

God, Reichardt movies are hard to explain.  How do you note that Lucy and Joy is about a woman and her dog as she tries to find a job, but that it's about so much more than that?  This, like that, is about so much more than theplot and It's so worth your time.

★★★★ 1/2

2020 - Written and directed by Kelly Reichardt.