Director Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow begins with a quotation from William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “the bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship.” Those words also serve as the epigraph for the novel from which the film is adapted, The Half Life by Jonathan Raymond. The latter frequently works with Reichardt, who has drawn on his short stories several times. Blake’s sentiment connects the idea of home in the natural world with humanity’s primal need for connection. These are familiar themes for Raymond and Reichardt: Old Joy and Night Moves revolve around man’s respect for nature; the complexities of community are at the core of Wendy and Lucy and Certain Women. Meek’s Cutoff, set in the 1840s, is rich in period detail. First Cow knits together all of these concerns (friendship, humanity’s bond with the natural world) in a historical fiction about the American spirit of self-invention and free enterprise.
As the film begins, a woman (Alia Shawkat) foraging in the forest comes upon a skull buried in the ground
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As the film begins, a woman (Alia Shawkat) foraging in the forest comes upon a skull buried in the ground
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