First Cow & Mrs. Miller

I really enjoyed Kelly Reichardt’s illicit cake-making caper, First Cow. Reichardt has done a lot to revise Western tropes in her work, so it’s fitting that this tale of the muddy, grubby, hard-scrabble Pacific Northwest pioneer days evokes most of all Robert Altman’s muddy, grubby, snowy 1971 revisionist Western, McCabe & Mrs. Miller. More than evokes—when early Altman regular and McCabe actor René Auberjonois shuffles by in a bit role, it’s a direct callout to that earlier film. It seems to signify that we are back in that particular world, in which Western types were subverted and matters of business (public and private) were the focus.

My description (having to do with cake) is a bit tongue-in-cheek, since nothing within Reichardt’s gentle, intimate gaze suggests a caper, exactly. Westerns are often about the blurry line between the wilderness and civilization; that’s just as true in Reichardt as it is in the key works of John Ford. But the “civilizing” force here is not the law, or the church, or the homestead but a cow. That she manages to stir up a bit of comic suspense on behalf of our milk-thieving protagonists (maybe it’s milk-rustling?) is one of the many small joys of the film.