In the past six years, the Academy award-winning actor Matthew McConaughey, the reigning prince of Austin, Texas, has kept busy. He raised his three kids in the city, written and released a bestselling memoir on “easy-livin’” (“because life is a verb”), taught in the film department at the University of Texas at Austin, pleaded for gun control at the White House after the horrific school shooting in his home town of Uvalde and “seriously considered” running for governor of Texas. But he has not acted on screen – relegating his last two film roles, underwhelming romps in Harmony Korine’s The Beach Bum and Guy Ritchie’s The Gentlemen, to the distant memory of a pre-pandemic 2019. With the end of the 2010s, the energy of the McConnaissance went elsewhere.
That is, until Monday, when McConaughey returned to red carpet promotional duties for the premiere of The Rivals of Amziah King, his first film role in six years, to a very friendly hometown crowd at SXSW. Atypically for a non-director, McConaughey introduced the movie himself with typical folksiness, in a stump speech worthy of someone still mulling a run for political office. “I thought I’d been busy,” he said as explanation for his absence from the screen. But the writer-director Andrew Patterson courted him back to acting with this “love story of a whole bunch of misfits and underdogs coming together”.
That’s the McConaughey ethos, and six years has not put in a dent in his ability to channel unassuming, laidback charm on screen. The movie, unfortunately, is a different story. McConaughey may be a capable driver, but this is an unwieldy vehicle – oversized, overlong and altogether way too many parts to run smoothly. Marketers of the Rivals of Amziah King will say that it defies genre – a noble pursuit, which in truth here means that it demonstrates a stubborn resistance to edits or commitment to even three lanes. The film, which Patterson worked on for seven years, is at points a stomp clap hey music video, a family drama, a farce, an ode to a certain idealized strain of Americana, a thriller, a heist movie and an origin story treated throughout with a reverence that reads as either too earnest or bizarrely incongruous.
It’s also essentially two movies, dual chapters in a familial love story between a man and his foster daughter. The first chapter focuses on Amziah King, a prototypically McConaughey creation of shaggy hippie, storyteller and community pillar, who runs a small-time honey business in the American south; Patterson lavishes attention on the ambient and wisecracking Amziah, his rootedness in the maintenance of his hives and his ragtag community of honey helpers/folk musicians (played by Owen Teague, Scott Shepherd, Rob Morgan, Tony Revolori and Jake Horowitz, among others), with the venerational glossiness of one of McConaughey’s Americana car ads. The second chapter shifts to Kateri (newcomer Angelina LookingGlass), Amziah’s prodigal foster daughter, as she grows into leadership of the business via legal and illegal means, with a healthy dose of vigilante justice aimed at a shady agricultural bigwig played with avuncular menace by Kurt Russell.
Shenanigans abound throughout the film’s sluggish 130-minute runtime – Patterson maintains a consistent strain of slapstick comedy (with occasionally gruesome punchlines and less occasional payoff) that peppers even the darkest moments and that supersedes signposts of plot. At times, that makes for an intriguingly slippery watch, a curious oddball dodging the usual audience holds for narrative film. (Or just becoming a music video for admittedly hypnotic fiddle music.) But it’s an overall off-putting symphony, full of notes too discordant and wayward to cohere into a true ode to “a way of life”. (Amziah is set in the nominal present, but feels archaic throughout.)
There’s a nagging dissonance to the Rivals of Amziah King, which espouses a particular idealized vision of the US – racial harmony, community, unassuming dignity, rooted values – ramshackle bolted to a undercooked and bizarrely paced crime plot of dubious rationalization. No spoilers, but for a film that so earnestly eulogizes a communal and humane way of life, it boasts a strangely murky sense of ethics, treating life and death with the same off-kilter jauntiness. The longer the film meanders toward its predestined conclusion of triumph of the underdog, the more jarring the tone and the less coherent the picture.
And the more it misses McConaughey, who still possesses the mesmeric gravity of a movie star but disappears for over half the movie. Newcomer LookingGlass finds a sly humor in Kateri’s blossoming as a queen bee of the business, but there’s not enough to her, her background, her motives, her experience as a Native woman in the foster care system, to ground the freewheeling antics of the film’s second chapter. What I imagine is supposed to signal mystery and inscrutable cleverness instead reads as opaque.
In fairness, McConaughey stepping back from the spotlight in this case demonstrates a noble intention to let others shine, to direct attention to the overlooked, the smaller-time, the next generation. But without him and his melodic embodiment of aspirational Americana, the whole unsteady thing veers far off-key.
The Rivals of Amziah King is screening at the SXSW film festival and will be released at a later date
