The Rivals of Amziah King comes to us from producer/writer/director Andrew Patterson, who came up making commercials and promos for the Oklahoma City Thunder. He then went on to make The Vast of Night, which was promptly lost in the abyss of 2020. And his sophomore feature is already doomed to be one of those arthouse flicks that critics near-universally love and nobody else recognizes. So let’s see what we’ve got, shall we?
We lay our scene in some rural backwater town of Oklahoma. Matthew McConaughey plays the eponymous Amziah King, a prominent local beekeeper and honey farmer who plays bluegrass music with his neighbors in his spare time. I might add that he and his late wife apparently spent quite a few years adopting foster children. Enter Kateri (newcomer Angelina LookingGlass), who used to be one of Amziah’s foster daughters back when she was in grade school. Now she’s all grown up and come back to town.
Amziah insists on picking up where they left off. Thus he takes Kateri back under his wing, gives her a job at the honey farm, and introduces her to all his many friends in the local community. While all of this is going on, there are signs of widespread theft affecting other local beekeepers. This comes to a head when all of Amziah’s hives are stolen at the worst possible time.
An hour into the movie. The plot doesn’t even start until halfway in.
Yeah, there is some serious tonal whiplash going on. The first half is so many disconnected scenes without much in the way of conflict or stakes. We do get a few hijinks involving a stolen barrel of honey and a grade school infested with bees, but that’s about it. It’s a solid hour of McConaughey waxing poetic about community and bees and telling us all about his neighbors in between song breaks. And Kateri is simply taking it all in without much of any agency in the barely-extant plot. So why does all of this work as well as it does?
Well, that’s almost entirely due to McConaughey himself. The man is a force of personality, that’s been firmly proven by this point. I might further add that Amziah is supposed to be this charismatic pillar of the community, the larger-than-life embodiment of rural hospitality and heartland Americana. Simply put, this is McConaughey’s wheelhouse. This is his comfort zone. All the filmmakers had to do was put him in there and watch him work.
Secondly, the song breaks kick ass. The musical numbers perfectly demonstrate the rural charm, the devotion between friends and neighbors, and everything that makes this movie such a joyous comfort. I didn’t even care if the plot wasn’t moving for huge stretches at a time, it was enough to learn more about these characters by watching them play. It is simply too much damn fun.
It’s not every movie that can get by on heart alone, but that’s how this movie gets through the first hour. These filmmakers freaking love Oklahoma. This movie shows us every possible aspect of this Oklahoma town, the people who live in it, and how they live in it, and there’s nothing but unconditional love for every last granular detail. Even when the characters do something unimaginably — even gruesomely — stupid, or their quirks are played for comedy, it’s all done with good humor in the heartfelt spirit of compassion. Couple that with McConaughey’s innate charisma and authentic rural charm, and I simply found it impossible not to love this town as well.
But then the plot finally gets going. And with the aforementioned tonal whiplash, the film kicks into a whole ‘nother gear.
What follows is a wildly improbable series of events that transforms this film into an honest-to-god crime thriller. Complete with elaborate schemes and fiendishly clever setups/payoffs that are all great fun to watch. But what’s even better than all of that is what happens with Kateri.
In the first half, she’s a gormless and naive girl who barely says or does anything without Amziah telling her to. In the second half, she rises to the occasion and grows into a stone-cold calculating badass. The transformation shouldn’t work as well as it does, but this movie’s got some wickedly clever plotting and a starmaking debut from LookingGlass. Simply incredible.
Speaking of the cast, I’d be remiss not to mention Kurt Russell. He doesn’t get much screentime, but he makes every last moment count. Jake Horowitz and Scott Shepherd deliver fantastic work with characters who turn out to be significantly deeper than they first appear. Cole Sprouse does a serviceable job bringing some illusion of personality to a character who’s otherwise a plot device for exposition. Rob Morgan’s character is also more of a plot device than anything else, but he plays it with poignant empathy like only he could. And then we’ve got Tony Revolori, here playing the character who most perfectly embodies the film’s attitude of “bless your heart”. Guy’s a hapless dumbass, but the other characters treat him with kindness and the film respects his integrity all the same.
By the way, it’s worth pointing out the above cast and noting that this isn’t a cast made exclusively of white people. There are people of all different skin colors and multiple cultural backgrounds, all happy and together in this supportive community backwater. I respect that. And seeing as this is a film about destitute underdogs learning how to step up and support each other against a wealthy asshole — complete with beehives as a metaphor for community — that wide assortment of people and backgrounds makes the message all the more powerful.
Yes, The Rivals of Amziah King is overlong and aggressively padded. Yes, the plot is terribly paced and the tone is wildly inconsistent. Yes, the editing is loaded with obnoxious flourishes that take away from the sterling camerawork and the marvelous song breaks. With all of that said, Kateri’s development arc is so deeply compelling and elegantly delivered that it serves as a consistent through-line to anchor the film. Seriously, we had damn well better see a lot more of Angelina LookingGlass in the immediate future, and Matthew McConaughey is used to his full potential here. The whole cast is stellar, in point of fact.
It’s not every movie that can get by on heart alone, but this movie’s got so damn much of it. There really is no substitute for personally watching this movie and falling in love with these characters.