‘First Cow’ a moving portrait of harsh pioneer life

Movie review: "First Cow," directed by Kelly Reichardt, starring John Magaro, Orion Lee, Toby Jones.

In her powerful 1992 novel “The Living,” Annie Dillard portrayed what it must have been like to have lived in the Pacific Northwest during the late 19th century. As you can imagine, it was a difficult existence, not just for the native inhabitants but maybe even more so for the settlers who came to claim their land.

As a reviewer for Kirkus Reviews wrote, Dillard’s characters “threw themselves into a lifelong battle against the physical hardship, grueling labor, and frequent tragedies of frontier life.”

That’s about as good a description of Kelly Reichardt’s new movie, “First Cow,” as you’re apt to find. What it doesn’t say about “First Cow,” though, is even more relevant.

Reichardt based her movie on John Raymond’s 2004 novel “The Half-Life,” and the two corroborated on the screenplay of “First Cow” – just as they did on four of Reichardt’s previous films. Though familiar themes run through them all – the tenuous strains of intimacy, personal loss, the limits of loyalty, a perpetual sense of alienation – the film that “First Cow” most resembles is Reichardt’s 2010 work “Meek’s Cutoff.”

That film revolves around a wagon train of settlers in 1845 struggling to cross the arid lands of Eastern Oregon. “First Cow” both pushes the calendar back two decades and moves the setting to the more lush climate of Western Oregon. Following a brief intro set in present-day time, the film focuses on two characters attempting to survive in what another character describes as “a land of abundance.”

When we first meet him, Cookie (played by John Magaro) is the cook for an expedition of mostly bad-tempered trappers. Cookie forages through that so-called abundancy for what he can find, which consists mostly of mushrooms. Then, on one of his searches, he stumbles across a nude Chinese man, lurking amid the foliage, who explains that he is running from some Russians who want to kill him.

After Cookie gives the man – his name is King-Lu and he is played by the Hong Kong-born actor Orion Lee – a helping hand, the scene shifts to a settlement called Fort Tillicum, which is overseen by a self-important character who carries the title of Chief Factor (played by Toby Jones).

Cookie and King-Lu reconnect and team up to live in a small but comfortable shack that King-Lu has constructed. Soon, though, they begin to dream of a better life. Maybe start a restaurant, maybe a hotel.

And why not? Cookie is a trained baker, so he can make baked goods that the fort’s residents would find irresistible. All they need to make their fortune is milk, which is how they come to make nightly expeditions to steal milk from the only cow in the whole area – an animal owned by the Chief Factor.

It’s a dangerous situation and one that lends a sense of heaviness to a film that is already rife with struggle. But unlike some of Reichardt’s other films, especially “Meek’s Cutoff,” this heavy feel is balanced to a degree by the growing relationship – you could even use the word love – between our two protagonists.

Along with her patient style, one that is never in a hurry to arrive at a particular plot point, Reichardt is skilled at using small gestures to convey important messages. Cookie’s delicate handling of a small salamander, for example, presages the gentle ways he treats both King-Lu and the Chief Factor’s cow.

Further, the way the native inhabitants – likely members of the Chinook nation – haunt the fort make them, ironically, more observers than mere backdrops or, worse, victims. Notable among them is the actor Gary Farmer, familiar to fans of the 1998 film “Smoke Signals," who appears as a proud local tribal chief.

And all this – the gentle, caring friendship, the unhurried pacing, the recognition of indigenous peoples as actual beings – is the flip side of the actual story that Reichardt tells about how much of a struggle that life in the 1820s must have posed and how, when all is said and done, nature itself is the ultimate victor.

It’s almost as if she were giving a vision to a central idea that Annie Dillard expressed in this quote from her near-four-decade-old novel: “How loose he seemed to himself, under the stars! The spaces between the stars were pores, out of which human meaning evaporated.”

This review originally was broadcast on Spokane Public Radio.