Minari: Heart and playful moments in this tale of South Koreans seeking the American Dream in Arkansas dirt
By Karen Gordon
Rating: A
Minari, also known as water celery, is a Korean herb that is at its best the second year after it’s planted. It’s a perfect metaphor for what’s at the center of Lee Isaac Chung’s tender, affecting, semi-autobiographical movie Minari.
The film centers around the Yi Family. Jacob (Steven Yeun) has dragged his wife, Monica (Yeri Han) and their two children – seven-year-old David (Alan S. Kim) and their pre-adolescent daughter Anne (Noel Cho) - from California to the Ozarks in Arkansas. He has a master plan to start a farm where he’ll grow vegetables, specifically to sell directly to the Korean community.
Steven Yeun plays a South Korean born dreamer looking to turn his brood into an American farm family.
They’re starting from scratch from a patch of land that doesn’t have anything on it. He lights up when he sees it, saying he’s going to turn it his version of the Garden of Eden.
But, whatever he envisions, the look of shock and dismay on his wife’s face as they arrive at their new home, speaks volumes. What she sees is a large trailer parked on undeveloped land miles from town, and an hour from the nearest hospital. This last is a source of worry since little David has a heart murmur.
Things don’t get more impressive as far as Monica is concerned when they’ve settled in. And more pointedly, she’s not happy with her husband who may not have been as up front about his plans as necessary.
To help smooth things, Jacob arranges to bring her mother Soonja (Yuh-jung Youn) from Korea to live with them. In the tight quarters of the trailer, David is forced to share his tiny room with this stranger. And Soonja, as it turns out, is a different kind of grandmother. As he notes, she can’t cook, and as we note, she’s quite eccentric.
PROUDLY SUPPORTS ORIGINAL-CIN
Jacob and Monica are immigrants, originally from South Korea. Their kids, however have different roots: They're American, born in California where Jacob made enough money “sexing” chickens (separating the chicks by gender in a factory farm facility) to save enough to buy land and build a business for his family’s future.
In broad strokes Minari is a familiar story: an immigrant family searching for the American dream. The family is planted in Middle America, hands in the soil, led by a young, hard-working patriarch who is unwilling to let anything knock him back.
The American born kids toggle back and forth between languages and cultures: they speak mostly Korean at home, and eat Korean food, but they’re Americans.
Jacob sees nothing but potential. Monica, however, is still attached to Korea. There’s a terrific scene early in the film, where Soonja unpacks her luggage and hands her daughter giant bags of spices she’s brought from the Old Country that Monica receives with a mix of joy and homesickness.
Anyone who grew up with immigrant parents who spoke accented English and reverted to their original language at home will recognize the circumstance. But although the broad strokes are the immigrant story, closer in, it’s really about something more profoundly ordinary: simply family.
Part of the perspective of the film is through the eyes of David, a sweet little kid with a heart condition of some kind that means he’s indulged to a certain extent. Drama ensues, but he’s a much loved little boy living in the embrace of a loving family. And so for him, there is nothing so serious as to make him question this little cocoon.
Serious things do happen to the Yi family, but tonally, Chung has managed to walk an interesting line in this film. Minari often has a playful and slightly off-beat, even lightly comic tone at times.
Chung’s well-crafted film is amply aided by a uniformly superb, note-perfect cast, who bring colour, nuance and heart to the film. In addition to the main cast, Will Patton plays Paul, a humble and deeply religious Pentecostal man, prone to speaking in tongues, who ends up working the farm with Jacob.
Observed from a distance anyone’s family can look like a random group of people, each with their own odd quirks, all pulling in different directions, but coming together at the dinner table.
One of the joys of this film is the way he manages to capture all of this, in a seamless loving package.
Click HERE to watch Bonnie Laufer’s Q&A with Minari child actor Alan Kim.
Minari. Written and directed by Lee Isaac Chung, Starring Steven Yeun, Yeri Han, Yu Jung Youn, Alan S. Kim, Noel Kate Cho. Available on Premium digital and on-demand, and the Digital TIFF Bell Lightbox.