Dedicating more attention to the practicalities and criminal underbelly of the farm-to-table honey industry than certainly any fiction film before it, Andrew Patterson’s The Rivals of Amziah King is a sun-dappled neo-noir, a testament to collectivism coexisting with rugged individualism and a bluegrass musical that is, at all times, guided by its own muse. It’s a remarkable film, brimming with style, self-assurance, and idiosyncratic characters and incidents, although it is rather difficult to talk about at any length without puncturing the spell it casts on viewers or revealing the twists and turns that lay in wait for the viewer. Digressive and a little meandering, the film carries itself rather like a novel; playing out over discrete episodes that are rich in flavor and local color while skillfully disguising the precise shape of the film’s narrative for nearly half its runtime. Patterson’s creating a world here, one that in many respects is as alien as the sort one might find in science fiction, but it’s key to appreciating the film’s egalitarian spirit and its collection of oddballs and scoundrels.
The Amziah King of the film’s title is played by Matthew McConaughey as precisely the sort of man who lives up to that sort of name. A widower and apiarist (more commonly known as a beekeeper) with a billy goat beard, Amziah is introduced holding court at a drive-in burger stand off the highway somewhere in rural Oklahoma, serving as the mandolin player and lead vocalist for a scrappy (but not remotely unskilled) bluegrass quintet. Patterson’s camera glides past picnic benches and deep fryers, lingers on friendly, unvarnished faces anticipating this semi-regular occurrence while McConaughey is given a proper movie star introduction that finds him strolling from his pickup truck to order five steak sandwiches and Dr. Peppers (and a Cherry Coke) for the band before getting down to making music. The editing scheme is jazzy, with split edits where audio carries over unrelated imagery or the image freezes solely for the purposes of visual punctuation — should you view the film on streaming, one might be mistaken in thinking it’s buffering — but it builds to rapturous crescendo that immediately establishes these guys are a great hang.
The revelry is interrupted by several members of the police department who need Amziah’s help to solve a honey-related mystery (yup, it’s that kind of a film). A truck full of stolen honey with a street value of a quarter million dollars has turned up and the cops are hoping Amziah can help them trace it back to its source, which he believes is possible (apparently, some honey-makers label the insides of their drums for this very reason). But he’s going to need his team to help him excavate the honey so he can poke around inside the barrel. Amziah fires up the bat signal (bee signal?), and his workshop is soon inundated with a collection of local misfits to help Amziah melt down and process a 600 lb barrel of honey to try and learn its provenance. We follow Amziah through his buzzing hive (okay, final bee pun) of archaic industrial equipment required to process honey while everyone goodnaturedly busts one another’s balls, but it’s all skillful misdirection on the film’s part. Before the scene is over, one of Amziah’s helpers will be graphically scalped by a centrifuge, which is notable less for the injury than the indignity of someone having to then dig around in the inner workings of the extractor to rescue the top of the poor bastard’s head so it can be surgically reattached.
Does any of that play an especially important role in the events of the film? Not really, but it is illustrative of how the film operates, particularly in its first hour. Patteron’s film almost functions as a collection of local legends that call upon Amziah’s hypercompetence at the center of a swirling maelstrom (another prominent interlude involves the character spearheading the impromptu evacuation of an elementary school when an aggressive colony is discovered in its walls). Stepping carefully when talking about the film’s plot, it’s fair to say Amziah’s life becomes invigorated by the reemergence of Kateri (newcomer Angelina Lookingglass), a young Choctaw woman whom Amziah and his late wife fostered when she was a child and who returns to take a more active role in his daily operation and become his enthusiastic apprentice. When Amziah’s bees are stolen off his land by an unknown thief and Amziah is sidelined for medical reasons, Kateri even becomes the film’s de facto protagonist. With creditors converging and Amziah’s business hanging by a thread, Kateri descends into the beekeeping underworld where plundered hives are flipped to unsuspecting buyers, eventually working her way to Dob McCoy, an unscrupulous industrialist played by Kurt Russell in a performance that’s all belt buckle and sleepy menace.
Kateri’s search for justice sends her skulking about in dangerous places, engaging in daring nighttime heists on other people’s lands while demonstrating an ambivalence toward killing that her mentor Amziah surely wouldn’t approve of. The Rivals of Amziah King goes to some deeply upsetting places where the innocent are punished alongside the guilty, and yet the film’s tone remains shaggy and weirdly open-hearted. It’s a film consumed with the natural world and outmoded forms of production, as well as a sense of culture all but lost to time that the film’s motley crew of iconoclasts cling to. McConaughey’s prominence recedes as The Rivals of Amziah King progresses, but his warmth and affinity for outsiders hangs over the film, serving as a spiritual counterpoint for all the skullduggery and murder. It makes for a fascinating tonal collision where it’s as if the light is penetrating darkness rather than vice-versa.
Patterson, whose previous film — the period-set sci-fi indie The Vast of Night — qualifies as one of the few pleasant surprises of 2020, continues to demonstrate a preternatural level of confidence for someone making only their second feature. There’s a musicality to his direction even when Amziah isn’t rocking out with the boys, and the camera is always moving, exploring the space but in a way that feels complementary rather than ostentatious. What the film mostly demonstrates is extraordinary taste, earning the kind of buy-in from the viewer that is essential for the film’s unconventional structure and the way it upends expectations. It draws from all the expected contemporary titans (one can identify the fingerprints of Tarantino, Linklater, P.T. Anderson, and Malick amongst others), but the way their influences are synthesized in The Rivals of Amziah King feels singular, even when weighed against a modest body of work. It’s hard to imagine another artist telling this kind of a story precisely like this, and it’s the rare film that also works as a “yarn.”
Much of that can be laid at the feet of McConaughey, a welcome presence who has largely disappeared from movie theaters over the last half a decade. The Rivals of Amziah King finds the actor in his element: making music, working the land under clear skies while projecting relaxed authority on any number of subjects. The film even gives the character a folksy philosophy about potluck dinners and what each dish says about the person who brought it, which has a rather morbid payoff late in the film. But there remains an inner peace to the performance (he even tries to refrain from cursing as a born-again Christian), which emanates outward and touches everyone he comes into contact with. The film even contains an extraordinary sequence — the press notes claim the scene employs no visual effects of any kind — where Amziah holds an entire colony of live bees in his arms that takes on an almost messianic quality as the insects swarm McConaughey but seemingly do not sting him. The Rivals of Amziah King admittedly suffers from a perceptible charisma dip when the character isn’t onscreen, but even then his rascally decency is evangelized by every person he touches. It’s as if Amziah doesn’t so much have friends as he does disciples. Consider this writer one of them.
DIRECTOR: Andrew Patterson; CAST: Matthew McConaughey, Angelina LookingGlass, Kurt Russell, Cole Sprouse, Rob Morgan; DISTRIBUTOR: Black Bear; IN THEATERS: August 14; RUNTIME: 2 hr. 10 min.
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