Joel on Film

Here is a movie alive with ambition and imagination and the kind of vibrancy that makes the movies as special as they often can be. The Rivals of Amziah King begins as one sort of movie, flips a switch midway through to shift perspectives, and winds up latching onto the least expected mode of its storytelling. It begins, really, with the eponymous character himself, who is also a lot of things wrapped up in a single personality.

Amziah King is played by Matthew McConaughey with a worldliness that, if it has left him at all weary, doesn’t show the usual wear-and-tear of such a trait. The man is a beekeeper, first and foremost, but in the opening scene of Andrew Patterson’s sophomore film, we learn just how knowledgeable he is about the world of bees, the honey they produce, and the human systems of both preserving that honey and building an entire market around what is one of the most sought-after natural substances on planet Earth. Indeed, he even warns a police detective that honey, all by itself, has a black market filled with men as greedy as perhaps any such men can be, and that world can be ruthless, violent and messy.

These are not the pieces of information we expect from the opening moments of a movie like this one, which is also among the earthiest studies of man’s relationship with nature of recent years. Its use of bees, which Amziah keeps in three colonies spread out over as many small patches of land, is so transformative and transcendent that the fear which might come from the site of a whole swarm of them covering a man’s hand and wrist and arm (as well as the little shake he does to get them off) is fully dispelled. There is no doubt that we shouldn’t be frightened of the little insects, whose work is paramount to human survival, but some of us simply are: Here is a movie that could potentially change one’s perspective on something.

If that sounds pretentious or like some kind of reach, perhaps it’s a tribute to the film, written and directed by Patterson, that it sparks these feelings and observations. The movie is uplifted by beauty and goodness, yes, but also marked by tragedy and bitter conflict, held together by a pair of performances at its center that seek to ground all those things. The first, of course, is from McConaughey, whose Amziah is asked to help in locating a stolen batch of honey barrels from a single photograph provided by that detective (played by Bruce Davis).

Amziah thinks he can, which one supposes makes him sort of a forensic honey pathologist, a title that’s about as silly (but positively so) as the suggestion that he can locate barrels of honey by melting one of them down to see if the original producer left a calling card. After a grievous accident interrupts their plans and maybe puts them on the map in a way that nobody wants (it involves a ponytail, an extractor, and the combination of gravity and machinery, and let’s just have your imagination do the rest), Amziah simply goes along on his way, eating at various potlucks, and performing folk and country music with his band. Patterson needn’t even include a plot for a little while here, even once we reach a reunion that will redefine Amziah for us.

Years ago, he fostered a couple kids in need for a little while, and out of the blue nowhere, one of them, Kateri (Angelina LookingGlass), returns as a waitress at a local restaurant. Together, the two reconnect, and Amziah quickly teaches her the way of the beekeeper. All the while, a silent threat to his business emerges, and in a jarring move, the film becomes two stories.

If the first story is defined by its loose nature and the sense of spontaneous evolution, the second half is more narrowly focused in ways that really shouldn’t be expressly discussed. The impulse is to be disappointed by this shift, if only because one could also argue that it loses its focus on the multiple characters within its ensemble, that’s maybe not so much a wrong impulse as one that misunderstands Patterson’s intent here. The short of it is that Kateri takes charge of the narrative in a way that fundamentally rewrites our initial impression of her.

She begins as wholly self-conscious and easily discomforted young woman slightly intimidated by a room with a lot of people in it. By the time the third act arises, in which she pulls together some allies—the incomprehensible Chimmy (Scott Shepherd), the former Marine Remick (Jake Horowitz), and a fraud expert played by Cole Sprouse—to investigate a sniveling rich guy played by Kurt Russell, she has fully transformed into a character worthy of instilling a bit of fear. LookingGlass is great here at commanding all these modes, while never losing the spark of something like frailty in her eyes (having moved through the system, she knows the world and its darker sides).

The result is thrilling, no matter how slightly overcrowded its narrative becomes or how willing—perhaps too much so—it is to play in all the modes of its storytelling. The Rivals of Amziah King is refreshingly different and certainly something worthy of the discussion it will inspire.

Rating: ***½ (out of ****)