Oklahoman writer-director Andrew Patterson made an initially quiet but increasingly ripple-powered splash with his 2019 film The Vast of Night. A deftly made, dreamy, indie sci-fi quirk with soft edges and a nostalgic ambiance you can’t quite identify, the film won attention and love in cinematic places that matter — including at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival.
Patterson is happily back on the scene with The Rivals of Amziah King, another lovable misfit gem of a film, and on a much more ambitious scale. As for built-in marquee buzz, the film marks the first major role in six years for the iconic Matthew McConaughey — in one of his best performances to date and in a role that Denzel Washington came close to taking. Celebrity showbiz cred aside, the film is a beautiful and poetic ramble that demands to be seen, a genre-hopping invention that belongs in some as-yet-unidentified category.
To boot, Rivals is a thinking person’s summer breeze of a movie, easy on the eyes, ears (with a wonderful unplugged and neo-bluegrassy soundtrack), and heart, with feel-good cred of the earthy kind. Another point of distinction is the film’s focus on a profession and field of interest — apiculture, a k a the “bee arts” — rarely deemed suitable for the big screen, as with the piano tuner focus of the recent Tuner. Coincidentally, the bees’ and beekeeper’s life plays a small role in Yorgos Lanthimos’s bizarro Bugonia.
The titular Amziah King is a charismatic and kindly but tough beekeeper who plays music and spreads Southern hospitality on the side. It’s a role with “alright alright” McConaughey’s name etched all over it.
Blessed with a musical backdrop partly assembled by T Bone Burnett, the film conveys an obvious love of acoustic music. Musician characters filter in and out of the narrative and often give full performances of songs, a tendency introduced in the first scene, with a jam session at the Ulysses Steak Sandwiches, featuring McConaughey in a persuasive vocal turn.
The less-blissful outside world intrudes in the form of the police arriving to question Amziah about a truckload of stolen honey. Thus begins the darker side of the tale, about the nasty underbelly of the bee/honey industry, a thriller and crime-time element in the film that can be unflinching, yet somehow never sully an atmosphere sweeter and more affirmative than sinister.
In one of those memorable sweet junctures, the song “Quill” — by the functioning indie-folk band The Last Bison and featuring McConaughey singing heartily with Ben Hardesty — creates a deep pocket of emotional warmth at mid-point in the film, before things turn dark again.
A particularly heartfelt aspect of the tale finds Amziah embracing a young woman who once lived in his former foster-parenting home. Kateri, of Choctaw lineage (played powerfully by first-timer Angelina LookingGlass), becomes a driving force in the film’s story arc, through surprising twists of fate and a determination for vengeance. In the film’s second half, clearly delineated from the dramatic arc of the first, a principal villain is the ruthless and legally suspect, competition-quashing bee magnate played by Kurt Russell. But even his character balances evil with worthy qualities: all is not black and white in this world.
And all is not linear in the storytelling. Within the film’s lazily wandering structure, memorable scenes stand out, from a darkly comic episode involving a workplace accident and a detached scalp to a particular potluck dinner. “There’s truth and lies in every potluck,” Amziah informs Kateri, informing her about the eccentricities of each dish maker, illustrated by brief vignettes of each character. Certain lines in the film resonate in symbolic and prophetic ways, such as “you don’t steal a man’s truck” (we discover the fiendish consequences later in the film) and Amziah’s explanation of the state of things in the bee world (and beyond): “worker bees decide who will be their queen … they also decide when it’s time for a new one.”
Ultimately, The Rivals of Amziah King carves out its own path as a genre-defying, gravity-defying rural American fable in which light trumps dark, and the healing force of music is always just around the corner.
The Rivals of Amziah King plays August 14-20 at SBIFF’s Riviera Theatre. Watch the trailer here.
