FYC: Kelly Reichardt for Best Director
Wednesday, March 10, 2021 at 7:00PM 
Today marks the end of Oscar voting. After the clock strikes 5 PM PST/8 PM EST all the ballots for the 93rd Academy Award nominations will be set in stone, and nothing will change until the results are announced next Monday. As it stands, this also marks the end of these FYC write-ups by the Team Experience. To conclude things, I took for myself the honor of writing the last such piece of the season. It's about my favorite of the Oscar eligible titles, a tale of kindness in an unkind world, of ancient friendships, untraditional masculinities, unhuman economies, and unforgiving histories. First Cow's Kelly Reichardt's magnum opus and the film for which the American cineaste should be conquering her first Oscar nomination…
There's no better way of explaining the genius of Kelly Reichardt's direction of First Cow than describing the opening salvos of the picture. We start on a fluvial landscape, a river running through the Oregon forest divides the screen. Because the aspect ratio is 4:3, the horizontality of the shore is secondary to the vertical expanse of water and sky, muted blues separated by a ribbon of arboreal green. It's an old land, the kind which has stood for centuries, a humble monument of nature's might and longevity. Such an image is so timeless that it could represent any period in human and pre-human history if not for the engine of modernity that cuts through the frame.
Almost perfectly centered, a rusty ship glides on the water's surface, its mechanisms contextualizing the landscape as part of our present time. The simple, yet powerful, juxtaposition of horizontal lines and vertical blocks, motion and serenity, fresh air and rust, old worlds and new contraptions, invokes a singular tone that's almost exclusive to Reichardt's cinema in our present panorama. The shot is glacially paced, allowing for prolonged observation, inviting us to mull over its mysteries and odd tonalities. Looking at it, I'm hit by a wave of melancholy, by the knowledge of how ephemerous the human world is, how cruel it can be, cold like metal. One also thinks about how that temporality can be beautiful in its own strange manner.
Such chilly reveries are interrupted by an anonymous woman walking her dog near the shore. She's nameless, but the camera regards her with as much generosity as it does every other character in First Cow, both human and animal. The inaction of these figures that seem to have appeared right out of Wendy and Lucy paired with the sounds of nature lull us to a hypnotic state. The canine ends up digging up the earth and uncovering something that startles its owner. However, instead of focusing on the digging done by the woman, Reichardt follows the dog, momentarily losing the film in the observation of animals running through the vegetation, birds flying above naked branches.
And then, when the time is right, we return to the woman and see what she has uncovered. Two skeletons lying side by side fill the screen. Instead of morbid, the discovery looks peaceful, scored, as it is, by the soundscape of the serene woods. Those beautiful noises serve as a time machine, transporting us to a past when the bones were still alive. The power of cinema denies death, contradicts time, and, in a cut, the miracle of life is restored. Other filmmakers might announce such transition with magnificent self-importance, but Reichardt keeps things simple, conspicuously modest, as gentle as the hands that we see searching the ground.
They are ruddy, dirty too, almost grayish in their sorry state and soiled bandages. Still, the motion of them is delicate, almost as if afraid to disturb the sanctity of the woods, their precious ecosystem, and the treasures it has to offer. This isn't a very colorful film, but there are such glorious chromatic contrasts in First Cow that make my cinephile heart aflutter. The dirty hands find mushrooms, bright yellow things that appear like thick oil paints smeared on an earthy canvas. He who picks them, his name is Cookie, a man with a disposition as sweet as his name. It's difficult to imagine another western protagonist taking time to help an upturned lizard, but that's what he does and those are the kind of actions Reichardt pays attention to. Not grand gestures, but these morsels of humanity.
The western is a brutal genre, often used to investigate contemporary injustices, modern violence, through a filter of period theatrics. First Cow subverts the subversion but makes no big show out of its feat, preferring to quietly remake the genre's model into a portrait of friendship and kindness, the importance of two lonely souls meeting and, for a little while, finding paradise in each other's company. They are Cookie and King-Lu, two outsiders in behavior and appearance, two figures that Reichardt regards with her habitual patience and asks us, along the way, to do the same. She asks us to find, in them, a spectacle of comradery at its best and most forlorn. First Cow is a movie that aches with affection for characters and spaces but is never sentimental. All in all, it's a tone so delicate one feels like a gust of wind could startle it out of existence.
Honestly, I could write endlessly about the feelings summoned by this amber diamond of perfect cinema. The relationship between people, between people and landscape, landscape and time, are intoxicating but so is the more prosaic elegance with which Reichardt immerses us in her universe. There're textures in the air, gold sunlight cutting through wispy plumes of azure smoke. She finds glorious beauty in fancy boots trudging through mud, while rickety strings sound off, muffled by faraway conversation and a river's constant stream. It's inebriating filmmaking, incredibly quiet but incredibly powerful for those willing to pay attention and blessed enough to find themselves in Reichardt's wavelength. In my perfect world, this is the kind of work that would end the season crowned with the gold of an Oscar.
First Cow is streaming on Fubo, Showtime, and DirecTV. You can also rent it from Google, Youtube, Fandango and Mubi. Go watch it if you haven't yet.
Reader Comments (15)
I honestly think she should've gotten nominated for Wendy & Lucy or Certain Women as she is just incredible.
Such a lovely piece, and a great note to end TFE's FYCs on. Well done!
Such a lovely piece of writing, if only the film were this compelling!
Sadly the “woman” spots are already filled.
She deserves it. Not gonna happen.
Loved reading this!
So beautifully said. Thank you. You captured the tender emotional landscape of this film perfectly with your words. This is easily my favorite film of 2020 and I am grateful there are others out there honoring it’s rich simplicity.
I thought it was a man.
Perhaps she is nominated after all? Screenplay is a possibility for sure. Maybe/hopefully Cinematography. Fingers crossed!
Kelly Reichardt this year and Joanna Hogg last year, both female directors delivering their career-best work. Sadly like Hogg she will be overlooked.
I liked this very much, still think her best is Meek’s Cutoff.
Shame there wasn’t a role for Michelle Williams in this.. maybe she could’ve walked the dog at the beginning!!?!
Every NYFCC winner for Best Film has been nominated for at least one Oscar. I would so love it if Kelly showed up in Director. She should be winning this.
She should be a very serious contender among the directors but I think her real shot is in Best Adapted Screenplay
This movie is in the top tier for me this year, right up there with Nomadland. It's been kind of sad to see it fall by the wayside with critics groups and the guilds, etc. I think it's just easy to overlook how profound the actual movie is because of the "small stakes" of what is going on. The movie was so tense for me I spent the final moment of it watching it between the fingers covering my eyes.
Beautifully written, Claudio. 100% co-sign; there's a reason this was my #1 movie of 2020.