Writer and director Lee Isaac Chung based "Minari" on his own childhood, growing up on a farm in Arkansas in the 1980s as the son of Korean immigrants. There's been some controversy in the awards race, with the HFPA having classified it as a "foreign-language" film, and thus ineligible for the main Golden Globe award categories. It's hard to think of a film this year, however, that is more American in its aims and its outlook.
We see most of the story through the eyes of David (Alan Kim), a seven year-old with a hole in his heart that has to be carefully monitored. He and his parents, Jacob (Steven Yeun) and Monica (Han Ye-ri), and older sister Anne (Noel Kate Cho), arrive in Arkansas to live in a cramped mobile home on a remote plot of land. They're strangers with no ties to Arkansas, having eked out a living in California, and saved up enough for Jacob to pursue his dream of having a farm of their own. From Monica's reaction to their new home, however, it's apparent that it's not a dream that they share. A short while later, Monica's mother Soon-ja (Youn Yuh-jung) comes to live with them, meeting David for the first time. He's not happy to have a grandmother who only seems interested in feeding him herbal medicines and teaching him to play cards, which causes more tensions in the household.
"Minari" is a very personal movie, very small in scope and specific in its milieu, but it's achingly universal in its themes. Jacob and Monica do their best to fit in, but they mostly converse in Korean with each other and their children, and struggle being so cut off from any community support. They constantly fight over their mounting debts and what's best for the family. Monica wants to go back to California, or anywhere closer to civilization. Jacob sees the farm as the only way they'll have something for themselves, and is willing to take more risks to ensure its success. Their white neighbors are mostly friendly, and Jacob hires an eccentric man named Paul (Will Patton) as a farmhand. There's no overt racism in the story, which I'm glad of, because the Yis have enough to deal with, just trying to get by.
The experiences of David and his family are very familiar and resonant for me, though my parents were Chinese immigrants, and I grew up on the West Coast. Watching the film brought back memories of my parents' stories about living in the Midwest before I was born, the different relatives who came to stay with us over the years, and hanging on to small tokens of our heritage and culture. Jacob deciding to grow Korean produce to cater to the growing population of Korean immigrants in the area seems like a foolhardy risk at first, but then there's the scene of Monica nearly in tears at the sight of familiar ingredients her mother brings from South Korea. And I remember my mother telling me about driving for hours to buy Chinese cabbage in the early '80s - only to have the bad luck of bringing home a rotten one.
Soon-ja is easily my favorite character, a lively, irascible old lady who develops a love of wrestling shows and teasing her grandson. The film's title, "Minari," comes from the secret crop of Korean minari plants that she grows at a nearby creek, which she observes has many uses and will grow anywhere. However, Steven Yeun and Han Ye-ri do the bulk of the heavy lifting, playing a once loving couple that is fraying after years of stress and bad compromises. While we root for them to overcome their hardships and stay together, their opposing views only seem to become more and more entrenched as the film goes on, and neither of them are wrong to want what they want.
I love the look of the film, warm and nostalgic, with a special emphasis on capturing the intimate family moments and the natural beauty of the rural landscape. There are no obvious indicators that the film takes place in the '80s, but nonetheless it perfectly evokes the era. The pace is slower, the atmosphere is rich, and the melodrama is heartwarming, life-affirming filmmaking of the best kind.
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