OVERVIEW
Deep in rural Oklahoma, widower Amziah King (Matthew McConaughey) runs the best honey operation around, plays bluegrass with a band of local misfits, and looks out for just about everyone in his community. Generous and always willing to help, he quickly agrees when the police ask for his expertise in investigating a stolen-honey case. At the same time, his former foster daughter Kateri (Angelina LookingGlass) unexpectedly returns after years apart. As the two begin rebuilding their relationship, Amziah’s rivals start moving against everything he has built.
BACKGROUND
Patterson essentially wrote The Rivals of Amziah King twice. His original 110-page screenplay was ready to shoot in 2018, before the unexpected success of The Vast of Night. When COVID hit, Patterson chose not to reshape production around pandemic-related limitations and instead used the time to rethink it entirely. The screenplay eventually ballooned to 360 pages across seven chapters, briefly taking the form of a miniseries, before he cut it back down into a single feature.
Matthew McConaughey was coming off a hiatus of his own. Six years removed from his last movie set, the actor had stepped away to focus on writing his memoir and ultimately chose The Rivals of Amziah King over considerably more lucrative offers. The film premiered at SXSW to a standing ovation but left the festival without a buyer, as studios have grown more resistant to mid-budget theatrical releases. Black Bear, which financed the film, eventually decided to release it itself, making it one of the first titles under its new distribution division.
THE REVIEW
Knowing that The Rivals of Amziah King once existed as a 360-page miniseries explains a lot about the film Patterson ultimately made. You can still feel that larger version inside it, sometimes to its benefit and sometimes to its detriment. The film moves in chapters, jumping between events, characters, and even tones, with moments that feel less like transitions between scenes and more like the end of one episode before another begins. It gives the film an unusual, sprawling quality, but also exposes Patterson’s struggle to condense so much story into a single feature.
At the center of the film is the bond between Amziah and Kateri, and this is where Patterson’s sprawling story finds its emotional anchor. McConaughey is instantly magnetic as a kind soul who still cares perhaps a little too much about his business, worrying about his honey even when a young man suffers an accident that could end his life. He is the kind of man who holds a community together, and McConaughey feels completely at home among the people around him. Yet there is a hidden sadness to Amziah, a sense that something important has been missing from his life, and the actor brings that spark back the second he reunites with Kateri. The montage in which he teaches her about the role of the queen bee, along with a later scene where he encourages her to sing, captures the warmth of their relationship and provides the film’s most affecting moments.
Much of that is also thanks to Angelina LookingGlass, who is nothing short of a revelation. There is an undeniable strength in her that makes Kateri’s development fascinating, particularly in the way she positions herself relative to the men in her life. LookingGlass can convey several emotions at once, especially during a scene in which the police interrogate Kateri about her past, allowing vulnerability, anger, and defiance to coexist without spelling any of them out. Films like The Bride should take notes: this is how you build a feminist character without reducing her to a statement.
Unfortunately, the film eventually takes some strange turns, several of them very much to its detriment. The crime story feels increasingly shoehorned into everything around it, at times recalling the pinnacle of awkward genre mashups, The Book of Henry. Despite being introduced in the opening scenes, the subplot never feels organically connected to what Patterson establishes around Amziah and Kateri, and when it finally takes over, it is very short on suspense. The motivations make sense on paper, but the film never establishes a strong enough connection among the characters to give Kateri’s pursuit the urgency it needs. At its core, this should be a story about a community coming together to defend itself against its own cancer, while establishing Kateri as a pivotal part of that community, but that sense of collective purpose only comes through in pieces.
In an effort to make everything feel more cohesive, Patterson relies heavily on associative editing, cutting between the present and fragments of earlier scenes, sometimes replaying images to connect events separated by large passages of the film. There are abrupt jumps forward as well, with the editing expected to fill in what happened between chapters. Rather than bringing the pieces together, however, the approach emphasizes how much connective tissue is missing.
Beyond those structural problems, Patterson’s filmmaking is certainly flashy and eye-catching, filled with great songs (what a fantastic soundtrack!), richly textured cinematography that bathes rural Oklahoma in warm, golden light while preserving the roughness of its landscapes, and playful montages. It works particularly well throughout the first act, from the first musical performance in the roadside diner to the darkly comic accident involving Amziah’s machinery. Elsewhere, the excess becomes distracting. A swarm infestation at a school, for example, combines music, comedy, and chaos into a sequence that certainly gets your attention but struggles to walk the fine line between amusing and goofy, too often landing on the latter.
FINAL THOUGHTS
The Rivals of Amziah King has enough personality that even its messiness can be fascinating. Patterson clearly has an enormous affection for these characters and this community, and whenever the film slows down to focus on Amziah and Kateri, that affection becomes infectious. McConaughey reminds us immediately why his absence from movie screens has been felt, while LookingGlass emerges as the film’s greatest discovery. But you can also feel that the much larger story Patterson once wanted to tell was never fully reshaped into a cohesive feature. The result is ambitious, entertaining, visually energetic, and frequently heartfelt, but also disjointed and uneven, a film whose individual pieces are often more compelling than the whole they form.