The Rivals of Amziah King

This final film at the Lotterywest Film Season for the Perth Festival is a surprising gem. It combines a great musical opening scene with a fine entrance from Matthew McConaughey. Writer/director Andrew Patterson knows who he's got on his hands here. McConaughey has fun with this role of Amziah King, his first real starring part since The Gentleman in 2019, and in fairness, the film probably wouldn't have been made without him.

The story goes thus: a honey maker (or beekeeper, apiarist, professor of bees, call him what you will) is coopted into helping the police identify a stolen batch of honey barrels. After a frankly incredible (in the good sense of the word) honey heating procedure that goes off the rails, Amziah finds himself at cafe, where he bumps into Kateri, a young woman who used to foster with him when she was a kid.

A star is unearthed here in Angelina LookingGlass (what a name!), in her debut film role, and the rest of the cast is fittingly grubby and grungy. Kurt Russell and Tony Revolori are top value, and if you think McConaughey's accent can be hard to understand at times, get a load of Scott Shepherd. He's a fine running gag.

Anyway, Amziah's paternal instincts lead him to offer Kateri a chance to join his faltering honey business, which she accepts. But the earlier crime, sidelined for a time, rears its head again, and provides some well-earned motivation for our leads. Occasionally the pace drifts a touch, and tonally, it shifts on its axis at times. It has some of the oddest moments I've witnessed on film for a while and one McConaughey line, at a swarm-troubled elementary school, was sheer droll brilliance.

Amziah's bees are a metaphor for loyalty and community - it's not subtle at all but the delivery works here. Patterson has bags of style, as he showed in his debut, The Vast of Night, and he fills the screen with stop-start visuals, ever-so-slight slo-mos, and banging stringed instrument tunes. One song near the middle is a crackling barnstormer.

Interesting to watch Kateri's development from sweet, self-conscious, small-town returnee to a more toughened operator. Think Audiard's A Prophet, but with more bees. Related to some of the narrative choices here, I've been thinking about Peter Biskind's book, The Sky is Falling, and how he argues that in recent pop culture, centrist ideas have changed to more extreme ones. 

Without wishing to spoil anything, there are one or two moments in this where a character makes decisions that would never fly in a mainstream Hollywood film, without it being used for darkly comic purposes. Sure, there are very good reasons for these plot choices, and they didn't take me out of the film (in fact, the character's background goes some way to explaining things), yet I still caught myself wondering, "Surely not...oh, ok. Maybe yes. So then, that's where this is going."

Without drawing too long a bow, it seems that present day 'Merica will generally see things through a polarised prism. So one side will cheer the vigilantism and small town insularity, while the other will support the Luigi Mangione-style, fuck the rich sentiments. I'd like to think I'm balanced enough to recognise both angles and still really enjoy the film.

The Rivals of Amziah King runs at UWA Somerville from March 23rd to 29th. Like I said, it's the final film at this season's Perth Festival, so don't miss out:)

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I do think this shares some DNA with Jacques Audiard's fantastic A Prophet (2009). It's pretty wild to look back at McConaughey's credits list - aside from his rom-com guffage, and before his McConnaissance, he was in some fine, varied films, like John Sayles's Lone Star (1996), Robert Zemeckis's Contact (1997) and the OTT but fun Reign of Fire (2002), directed by Rob Bowman.