With the exception of a Zach Bryan music video, Matthew McConaughey has been off the screen for six years, sticking to voicework while publishing a memoir and threatening to run for office. That’s the sort of absence that used to feel like a statement about an actor’s relationship with the industry (or vice versa), but in the tumult of the last half-decade, in which the pandemic was followed up by the strikes and a streaming-fueled contraction in the industry, a lull like that became nothing noteworthy — to the point where McConaughey himself, introducing The Rivals of Amziah King at its premiere at SXSW, joked that he’d felt plenty busy the whole time. That said, if the star’s pick of project for his return is a sign of where he’d like to go from here, it’s a thrilling one. The Rivals of Amziah King is the second feature from writer-director Andrew Patterson, who made his debut in 2019 with The Vast of Night, a 1950s-set sci-fi movie with the framing of a Twilight Zone episode and the wild ambition of an artist who didn’t treat limited resources as a barrier to big stylistic swings.
Set in Patterson’s native Oklahoma, The Rivals of Amziah King is impossible to sum up neatly. It’s the tender story of a man reuniting with a young woman he used to foster, and a raucous tribute to a rural community, and a depiction of the beekeeping industry, and also a revenge drama. Oh, and there are musical interludes — ebullient sessions where McConaughey’s character, the Amziah King of the title, jams on a mandolin, banjo, guitar, or kitchen table with his friends and neighbors and whoever else he can enlist to join him in song. You know, just another one of those. In the context of a film festival that can feel like a series of corporate brand activations, The Rivals of Amziah King might as well be outsider art, though calling it that suggests that Patterson, who ran his own production company, doesn’t know exactly what he’s doing.
It’s more accurate to say that he doesn’t feel bound by commercial conventions when it comes to structure or genre. Or aesthetics — the movie opens with Amziah and his pals, Rob Morgan, Owen Teague, and Scott Shepherd among them, warming up by Ulysses’ Steak Sandwiches, a drive-up restaurant that’s also their informal venue for the night. They’re local guys who look like area demigods in that parking lot, their performance captured with stutter-stop editing and freeze-frames, the dredging of beef cutlets and frying of tater tots and the rapt face of the girl at the register spliced in as though they all have equal bearing on the overwhelming sensory pleasure of the night. The group plays a howl of a tune that would have gone over huge in the stomp-clap heyday, if its members were aware such a thing even happened, and if they were a band and not part of a loose collection of friends who just like playing together.
While The Rivals of Amziah King is as overstuffed as a comfy sofa, if it’s about one thing in particular, it’s about the work that goes into holding together a community. Amziah, the linchpin of his, is a typical McConaughey character — a force of nature and a big talker who exudes an easygoing affection for life. But he’s also older, and more aware of his mortality, with a heart condition and exhaustion pinching the corners of his eyes. After that opening scene gives way to an unexpected all-nighter whose outrageous details are better left to be discovered, Amziah sits wearily in the morning sun at a diner, and for a second, you can practically see the skull under McConaughey’s bronzed skin. Then he notices that his server is Kateri (first-timer Angelina LookingGlass, all watchful gaze and still waters running deep), who, along with her brother, lived with Amziah and his ex-wife years ago as foster children, and breaks into a grin that has its own radiance.
Amziah accrues people, from a surly banjo enthusiast played by Tony Revolori to the Brazilian couple living in his backhouse, to the slate of employees that includes lost boys and ex-cons looking for a fresh start. Kateri, who becomes just as much the film’s protagonist as Amziah, isn’t for him just the latest of these, but a possible successor to his role, a position she’ll come to prove herself worthy of. The Rivals of Amziah King finds its way into some riotous diversions — like a church potluck that becomes an excuse for a storytelling exercise and a bee emergency at a local elementary school — before taking a turn into what can only be described as an agricultural crime drama featuring Kurt Russell. But it’s always concerned with its people first, laying out a reality of scarcity in which everyone can either opt to prey upon or try to take care of one another. It makes a ramshackle case for the latter. But the film’s affection is never undercut by romanticization, because it’s always aware that creating that kind of affinity requires effort and maintenance, and it’s so much easier to drift apart than it is to build.
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