It’s been six years since Matthew McConaughey starred in a movie, and when you watch “The Rivals of Amziah King,” it’s easy to see why this was the one that lured him back. It gives him a role that fits his scraggly aging-bad-boy redneck charm like a glove — and, at the same time, it’s different from anything he’s ever done.
The film itself is different from anything you’ve ever seen, in ways both good (the first half) and not as good (the second half doesn’t always parse). Yet there’s an audacity to the movie, which is a neorealist beekeeper musical Western revenge fable, that gets inside your system. The director, Andrew Patterson, has a vision — of life, and of how to tell a story — that he enacts with so much confidence and verve that even when what he’s doing doesn’t totally work, you may find yourself going with it, because this is what independent filmmaking is about: unfurling a story on the high wire.
Patterson cuts corners, often in a precocious way, but he knows exactly what he’s doing with his actors. He gets a magnetic turn out of McConaughey and showcases a new performer, the Native actor Angelina LookingGlass (this is her very first credit), and you may come away thinking that she’s a star. She’s radiant and sly and subtle and captivating. She carries you through this heartland drama that’s reality-based and, at the same time, a knowing movie fairy tale.
It’s set in rural Oklahoma, where McConaughey plays Aziah King, a veteran honey maker who’s a born-again Christian and a bit of a broken man (he’s a widower with a heart condition), though we can see that he relishes his life. In the opening scene, Aziah and his pals gather in the parking lot of a local fast-food drive-in, where they take out their instruments and launch into a bluegrass performance, even though no one is there to listen to them. That’s okay; they’re playing for themselves. And the music has a scruffy joy to it. They sound like Mumford and Sons if that band had never gone professional.
Some local police approach Aziah because they want his assistance. The cops found a truck carrying 20 barrels of stolen honey worth a quarter of a million dollars. Can Aziah help them identify where the honey came from? That sounds like the set-up for an offbeat thriller, but something even more offbeat happens: As Aziah revs up his honey excavator (a machine that whirs with lethal speed), one of his musician pals (Tony Revolori) leans his head in a little too close, and the machine scalps him, ripping off his hair and pony tail and the layer of skin attached to it. The sequence that follows (getting him to the hospital, and fishing the scalp out of the excavator) is at once queasy, funny, and gripping in a shit happens sort of way, and it sets the tone for all that follows. This is a movie that operates by scalping our expectations.
At a diner the morning after, Amziah looks up at the waitress serving him coffee, and it’s none other than Kateri (Angelina LookingGlass), who lived with Amziah and his wife for two years as a foster child when she was 8 and 9. She was taken away after Amziah’s wife died, and the two haven’t seen each other since. But the way that Patterson establishes the persistence of their connection, simply from how they look at each other, is the sign of a humanist filmmaker. Amziah, lonely, offers to take Kateri on and teach her the honey business, and this is a movie that lets you touch the eccentric soul of that business — a calling, really — as surely as “Ulee’s Gold” or the Macedonian documentary “Honeyland” did.
You can feel McConuaghey’s delight as he chows down on the scene where Amziah takes Kateri to a potluck and explains the meaning of each dish. Or the one where he and his pals, who include a wily Rob Morgan and an angelic long-haired barefoot Owen McTeague, gather in Amziah’s kitchen to play another musical number, this time with Kateri singing along — which she finds an obnoxiously intrusive request until she starts doing it, at which point the film seems to be rediscovering what playing music can be: the shared rapture of ordinary people. For its opening 45 minutes or so, “The Rivals of Amziah King” revels in a grounded vision of happiness.
But, of course, it’s too good to last. In the middle of learning the honey business, Kateri wanders one morning over to the rows of boxes that contain Amziah’s hives, and she discovers that they’ve all been stolen. I will not reveal what happens next, but suffice to say that it soon falls to Kateri to start running the business. And that is not going to work (there’s $30,000 in debt) unless she can retrieve those stolen hives, a process that will lead her into a hornet’s nest of local corruption.
To watch and enjoy the second half of “The Rivals of Amziah King,” you have to accept that Kateri, who seemed so innocent at the start, becomes a stealth heroine. She gets help from Oat (Jake Horowitz), a geek operator at her old job, as well as Cole Sprouse as the closest thing here to a dashing young leading man. Mostly, though, it’s up to Kateri to pursue her lone justice, which she does with a lack of remorse that’s shocking. Then again, you might say that the flip side of the film’s feel-good Christian benevolence is its eye-for-an-eye ruthlessness. And when Kurt Russell, looking like he’s warming up to star in “The Steve Bannon Story,” shows up as a local honey baron who’s as rapacious, in his way, as John Huston in “Chinatown,” we’re ready to see him get what’s coming to him.
A bigger issue with the film’s second half is that John Montague’s screenplay drifts away from plausibility. Yet even as that’s happening, Patterson stages it all with a precociousness that keeps the film knowingly off-balance. And it’s Angelina LookingGlass who makes the movie’s lethal gamesmanship work even as you’re peering through the holes in its suspense storytelling. Her charismatic poker-faced resolve incarnates the film’s message, which is that in some of the situations that life hands out, you’ve got to be cruel to be kind.
