Mathew McConaughey may not always play the same character from movie to movie — the 2010s-era McConnaisance, so-called, offered proof of that, variously casting him as a corrupt cop and hitman (Killer Joe), a seductive ringleader of male strippers (Magic Mike), a NASA pilot (Interstellar), and an AIDS-afflicted cowboy (Dallas Buyers Club), among others. On the other hand, there are certain McConaughey characters who, once embodied by the drawling Texan (with gift-o-gab Irish roots!), become impossible to picture with another actor involved. You can see how Matt Damon might have played the good-guy conflicted-dad part in Interstellar, sure. Different tenor, but it would play. It’s harder to imagine Damon, or Brad Pitt, or Leonardo DiCaprio, or any number of others, strumming or slow-gyrating their way through Magic Mike, singing to the ladies of Tampa.
Amziah King, the gentleman honey farmer McConaughey plays in the new movie The Rivals of Amziah King, is another such role: McConaughey’s latest, and his first live-action theatrical release since 2020. (The Lost Bus appeared in a few theaters last year before dead-ending on Apple TV, but it was shot after this one, which was actually made a few years ago.)
The Rivals of Amziah King isn’t receiving quite the level of fanfare that it deserves. It’s worth rushing out to see not so much because it’s the first time McConaughey’s face has graced a big screen in a while, but because it’s one of the best movies he’s ever done. You can understand the challenges distributor Black Bear must have faced, though, namely that the experience of the movie nearly impossible to succinctly describe.
The bare outline sounds like something Wes Anderson might cook up; specifically, it has some parallels to Anderson’s most recent film, The Phoenician Scheme, about a man rich in cash but poor in morals (and maybe also in cash) attempting to train his estranged daughter to run his infrastructure-heavy business. Amziah King isn’t nearly so nefarious, and would (probably) never pass out hand grenades as a means of hospitality. He runs a honey business, one that can be surprisingly competitive with seemingly thin margins; he’s also a raconteur and a musician, traits that sound insufferable but are allowed to draw the audience in slowly and surely, giving the film the quality of an in-progress folk tale. When Amziah bumps into Kateri (Angelina LookingGlass), a former foster child he cared for some years ago, he takes the young woman back under his wing and starts to show her the ropes of his business.
That doesn’t exactly do justice to the idiosyncratic rhythms of The Rivals of Amziah King, written and directed by Andrew Patterson (though he used a pseudonym on the screenplay). Patterson’s previous film was the one-night UFO-sighting movie The Vast of Night, and Amziah King applies that movie’s purposeful momentum to what initially seem like a series of winding detours, ultimately more resembling set pieces, as Amziah walk-and-talks his way through helping with a police investigation while fielding a terrible (if darkly comic) accident at his facility. Later, he takes Kateri on a mission to address a bee infestation at an elementary school. These scenes don’t necessarily feed into a master plot — they’re more necessary for the emotions of a mid-movie pivot I won’t spoil than the story, per se — but Patterson, as he did in his earlier film, teases the urgency out of every moment, even when life and death aren’t hanging in the balance.
The movie’s fusion of tracking-shot velocity and bucolic-grain splendor mirrors the way it absorbs a number of different genres into a single narrative; alongside the comedy and drama, there are elements of Western, musical, and crime thriller. They’re all genres McConaughey has touched before, and he glides through the movie with a charm whose effortless appearance is why you hire a movie star for this role (and whose believable warmth is why maybe you could only actually hire McConaughey, at least for this version). Yet as showy a star turn as this is, LookingGlass has just as much lifting to do, playing a young Native woman navigating her way through a surprisingly contentious vocation. There’s a stretch of the movie where she has to function almost like a dogged noir hero, and she holds the screen even in scenes without her super-famous partner. There’s terrific support, too, from an eclectic cast that includes Owen Teague, Wes Anderson vet Tony Revolori, Rob Morgan, Riverdale’s Cole Sprouse, and just a smidge of Kurt Russell.
The Rivals of Amziah King offers such a steady stream of unexpected pleasures that it might take a while to get a bead on what Patterson is saying. That, too, is an advantage of casting McConaughey, who stays so rooted in the movie’s immediacy that it never feels didactic in a story that ultimately may be about the messy business of carving out a piece of the expansive, yet jealously guarded, American pie for yourself (and what you do with it if you’re able to). The movie’s vision of Americana is just rough-and-tumble enough to feel convincing amidst its litany of tall-tale absurdities.
The Rivals of Amziah King is a movie as simultaneously caricatured and naturalistic as McConaughey’s drawl.
The Rivals of Amziah King is now in theaters.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.
