Matthew McConaughey plays a bluegrass musician and beekeeper – folksy enough already? – in Andrew Patterson’s follow up to the great Vast of Night. It looks like The Rivals of Amziah King is going to be another of those Dallas Buyers Club McConaughey performances: hugely charming and borderline irritating, the wild-eyed maverick, Southern drawl, good with words, charismatic and so on.
Patterson gets things going in a good ol’ boy vein, with McC’s Amziah King and his friends all arriving one by one by flatbed truck at an open air diner, where pretty waitresses serve hot food glistening out of the deep fat fryer and everyone knows everyone’s name. As King and co tune up and then get some hoedown vibes going, hollering and proud, it’s a picture of Americana on stilts, on steroids, shot warm and slick like a fast-food commercial. But there is a single black guy in this very white picture, a member of King’s band, no less. Tokenism? Or a hint that something else is going on?
King is only a musician as a sideline. His main job is as a proud smalltime beekeeper running his own concern. A Christian, straight-talking and straight-dealing dude, he’s called in by the cops early on when they find some mysterious barrels and suspect they contain stolen honey. King helps them identify whose honey it was.
By the time we learn that King has a family of Brazilians living out the back of his house, and that his family fostered a Native American girl some years back, it’s become blindingly obvious writer/director Patterson isn’t just interested in matters apian. He has things to say about a hopeful, less racially obsessed America, one that looks out, head up, rather than inward with a grievance. To that end, McC is perfect casting. The embodiment of swagger, he’s the sort of actor the guys in the white pointy hats would love to call one of their own…
There is a kicker. As Patterson winds us into a plot about the theft of honey – worth a fortune on the street, apparently – the focus shifts from McConaughey’s Amziah King to Kateri (Angelina LookingGlass), the Native American sweetie McC’s family once fostered. Though Amziah and McConaughey look like they’re going to dominate this film, after bouncing shoulders back onto the screen they quietly retire from it, popping up only now and again in flashback to justify the character’s name in the title.
Leaving LookingGlass’s Kateri to take over. Tall order. Done with some aplomb.
At times Patterson’s film looks like it’s going to be swamped by its message about an America that needs to stop being so small-minded. And at times it is, but he has back-up – that crime-thriller plot about artisanal beekeepers having the fruit of their hard work stolen. The fascinating LookingGlass’s challenging lead-role takeover. Some musical interludes. The occasional blackly comedic moment, like the scene early on where a man loses his scalp in honey-extraction machinery and it’s treated as a joke.
There’s even a car chase. Plus Kurt Russell’s Dob McCoy, the villain of the piece, representative of Big Honey and everything that’s wrong with everything today.
Patterson goes at it in freeform, Robert Altman loosey-goosey style, though he’s most obviously aiming for high-period Coen brothers, a melding of 1970s moviemaking with the bright, hurry-up style of the 1930s. The second half of the movie is devoted to a save-the-orphange plot requiring the tracking down of stolen bees. How do you even steal bees?
LookingGlass does not try to compete with McConaughey’s loose and florid performance. In fact she goes the other way, deadpanning her way through her lines as if chasing a minimalist personal best. Having mostly dispensed of the services of its star early on, Patterson has another surprise for later in the movie, when he starts shifting the ground under the feet of the players who are left. Sympathies are redistributed.
Sometimes Patterson’s run-through of the genres can get a bit exasperating, and his film shifts from being message-driven to genre-driven at about the same time as McConaughey leaves the screen. One two occasions Patterson takes us to a Pot Luck supper, where diners take in dishes they’ve made at home and help themselves to bits and pieces others have brought in. It’s a Pot Luck kind of movie.
The Rivals of Amziah King – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
