Matthew McConaughey, left, and Angelina LookingGlass in The Rivals of the Amziah King.Kyle Kaplan/The Associated Press
The Rivals of Amziah King
Directed and written by Andrew Patterson
Starring Matthew McConaughey, Angelina LookingGlass and Kurt Russell
Classification N/A; 131 minutes
Opens in select theatres Aug. 14
Critic’s Pick
About a third of the way through writer-director Andrew Patterson’s massively entertaining new film, The Rivals of Amziah King, its title character, a wily Oklahoma beekeeper who could only be played by Matthew McConaughey, introduces his now-grown foster daughter Kateri (Angelina LookingGlass) to the culinary topography of the local church potluck. Every steam tray and cooler, Amziah points out, is filled with ingredients carrying their own history and flavours. And even if each dish seems to contrast with the next, pile them all high on a single plate and you’ve got yourself a surprisingly delicious meal.
Patterson’s film is pretty much the same, a cinematic buffet of all-you-can-eat incongruity that adds up to one tasty dish. At once a toe-tapping musical, a Gothic whodunnit, a jaw-dropping dark comedy and a hard-boiled revenge flick, The Rivals of Amziah King is a Southern-fried delight, without ever being self-indulgently gluttonous.
It is a challenge to detail the plot for two reasons. One wrong move and you’ll stumble across, and thus spoil, the many narrative trip-wires that Patterson has laid down. But more importantly, the film is just so dang unpredictable that any attempt to pinpoint and massage its story operates against the spirit in which it was made. Mostly, you should know that the film focuses on the many plights of Amziah, who is roped into a police investigation involving stolen barrels of honey, and what happens when Kateri walks back into his life after years of separation.
Patterson, whose inventive 2019 UFO drama The Vast of Night delivered Spielberg-ian intrigue on an ultralow budget, obviously carries a torch for the filmmakers he binged as a child. Here, it’s the Coen brothers leading the way: There is as much O Brother, Where Art Thou? there as there is Fargo and The Big Lebowski, especially in scenes where bandits and banjos collide. But the Oklahoma-based filmmaker still takes pains to create a heightened world all his own, filled with bumbling if sympathetic cops and blatantly crooked businessmen (the latter personified by a delightfully sleazy Kurt Russell).
Would any of it work without the calm-in-chaos presence of McConaughey? Maybe, maybe not. But the fact is that Patterson managed to secure him as the centre of this particular universe, and the star delivers his best big-screen performance in a long while. (McConaughey also, coincidentally, delivers his second film in a row involving a scene of terror aboard a school bus full of children, though Amziah King’s sequence is most definitely played for more laughs than the wildfire nightmares of Paul Greengrass’s The Lost Bus from last year.)
When Patterson’s The Vast of Night slipped onto Prime Video during the thick of the pandemic, it wasn’t hysterical to worry that the filmmaker’s career would become a victim of the streaming wars, never able to access the higher budgets and talent he deserved. The fact that The Rivals of Amziah King even exists defies that initial doom, though it’s also getting shunted into a late-summer slot filled with an unusually large number of high-tier competitors (Jane Schoenbrun’s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, Matt Johnson’s Tony), all fighting to stand out from Spider-Man’s multiplex-devouring shadow. Do Patterson and yourself a favour by sticking to the director’s career closely – it is one actually worth the buzz.