The Meek’s Cutoff director returns with a distinctive story about a pair of drifters trying to make money by stealing milk from a newly-arrived cow
Kelly Reichardt gives us a terrifically tough and sinewy tale of the old west, shaped by the brutally implacable market forces of capitalism. She and her regular screenwriting collaborator Jonathan Raymond have adapted Raymond’s own 2004 novel The Half-Life, evidently pruning some of the epic adventures in the original and bringing it down to a tensely immediate situation. She and Raymond tell their story with force and skill and the movie is shot with beautiful simplicity. There’s a muscular authority in its plainness and its calm, unshowy evocation of the
American landscape.
A prelude in the present day shows a young woman discovering two human skeletons shallowly buried in Oregon woodland. What is the story here? Reichardt takes us back to the 1820s where “Cookie” Figowitz (John Magaro) is a slippery adventurer who has been hired as a cook in a trapping party but has proved utterly incompetent – at least as far as his aggressive and hungry fellow trappers are concerned. So he splits from them and finds himself befriending an itinerant Chinese worker called King Lu (Orion Lee), and for a while, the pair seem no more than a couple of hobos, finding common cause in their own loneliness. They dream of getting rich as entrepreneurs - and they are not stupid or lazy. But of course any new business needs capital. And how to get it? Why, with that certain special something that is the invisible foundation stone of all great fortunes: a crime.