RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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Though he's in less than half of Andrew Patterson's Oklahoma Western " The Rivals of Amziah King ," Matthew McConaughey looms over the film like a myth in human form. His role as the title character, a mandolin-playing beekeeper out of Oklahoma, is also the twangy Oscar winner's first screen role in six years. And it's a testament to how mythic McConaughey himself is, and how much we take the Texan's presence as granted and a given, that his absence from our movies and television didn't register at all. He, like Amziah, looms regardless. Related Stories How the Enduring ‘Ang Tanging Ina’ Movie Franchise Molded Filipino Comedy Beyond a Good Laugh Joe Dante's 'Explorers' Got Lost in the Shadow of 'Back to the Future,' but Deserved Better
Oklahoma writer/director Patterson pays homage to his roots — and the people who laid their foundation — in his high-spirited, energetic follow-up to the 2019 Slamdance winner " The Vast of Night ." Where that 1950s-set UFO chiller blended "The X-Files," B movies, and classic radio dramas, "The Rivals of Amziah King" cross-pollinates a bluegrass musical, beekeeping drama, a Native American Western, and a winding Mark Twain journey up a river, and a narrative that lustily taps its feet on the knife's edge of twee and earnest.
But there's enough crowdpleasing spark to cut through the over-direction — at times, Amziah's bluegrass band, led by Owen Teague in a wordless performance, is cut and assembled more like a music video than a movie, Patterson slowing down, freezing, and accelerating frames at a whiplashed frenzy. Yet vistas of the Oklahoma landscape, and Patterson's tenderness for the Choctaw Nation in the former of a former foster child named Ketari (newcomer Angelina LookingGlass), indicate a filmmaker with a no-doubt strong vision, each take (and there are many) embodying a sense of having been precisely storyboarded and choreographed.
Patterson re-teams with cinematographer M.I. Littin-Menz who, on "The Vast of Night," sent us hurtling through the night sky and the insides of a switchboard all the way onto the court of a high school basketball game, to again create sequences that feel show-off-y and bravura for bravura's sake, but with several terrific set pieces that set the film apart.
The film begins somewhere in modern times at an American-as-apple-pie burger stand where Amziah and his band are putting on an anthemic bluegrass performance. Amziah is a feral creature of a man, hair unwashed, his sweat-beaded flesh and unwashed hair practically oozing Southern. He runs a beekeeping farm with the help of only a few associates, and it's brought to his attention by local authorities that lost barrels to the tune of $1,500 a pop (and perhaps higher in street value) from a neighboring farm have shown up in the back of a truck, unidentified.
Amziah hatches a plan using propane heaters to melt the honey out of the barrels to look for an identifying mark that could trace them back to their owner. In one of the film's many (and seemingly unnecessary) slapstick moments of bodily injury, one of the kids from the Armadillo propane company (Wes Anderson favorite Tony Revolori) gets scalped by the extractor, certainly a bloody scene to open any movie, and setting the unpredictable, careening tone ahead. Amziah and his cronies rush the boy to the hospital, his scalp in a plastic honey jar. It's an ambitious and gasp-inducing start to a film that intentionally never settles on one particular tone.
As if by happenstance, Amziah reconnects with Kateri (LookingGlass), a young Native woman whom he and his late wife fostered on their farm when she was eight years old. The sweet-faced girl is now working in a diner, though beyond her plot function, Patterson never quite digs into who she is as a person on her own terms. Seemingly no time has passed as their bond resumes, and Amziah, a self-professed Born Again Christian, takes her back under his wing, perhaps priming her to become the heir to a honey empire he knows is on its last legs, and weighed down by a lot of debt because of Amziah's overeager largesse toward the locals.
LookingGlass, who gives a fine-enough turn that occasionally feels under-directed by her filmmaker whose tendencies lean more toward visual flair than the nuances of performance, has a permanently tacit gaze that suggest she's unafraid of whatever life bats at her. The bees, in fact, don't sting her, making his estranged daughter something of a miracle who's just turned up to save his life.
There's a chaotically, even brilliantly orchestrated sequence in which Amziah and Kateri are summoned to a local elementary school, where a swarm of bees has left hordes of students stunned or in a panic, and a bus driver in shock after one stings his jugular. Again come the choreographed jolts of bodily injury, as a too-serious teacher walks into a glass door, and a bus goes bouncing over a pothole, sending the evacuated children in the air and their heads slamming into the ceiling. Much of the film's penchant for unexpected violence leads to troubling plot twists that defy character logic.
In ways I won't spoil, Amziah is largely absent from the movie's second half, leading Kateri to take up running the farm herself and become a kind of avenging angel after his hives are stolen. The violent tricks she has up her sleeve in terms of how she gets back at Amziah's competitors feel abrupt and unexpected, like when she traps someone in a boiling-hot room, leaving them to their death. The film, in moments meant to gin up audience whoops and cheers, seems to celebrate those acts of violence even when they feel totally antithetical to the character.
There's an amusing ensemble here, with Rob Morgan as a pensive local cop, Cole Sprouse as an informant named Oat who works at a fish fry joint called Sad Abe's, and Jake Horowitz as a reedy criminal on parole who aids Kateri on an upriver journey and back to retrieve the stolen hives. But there's also a bit o...
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