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Minari is a leafy green vegetable (sometimes called water celery or teardrop) popular in Korean cuisine. In Lee Isaac Chung’s cute new film, he blossoms in a creek bed in Arkansas, providing a title, precise detail, and maybe a metaphor too.
Like the minari, Jacob and Monica Yi and their two children, Anne (Noel Kate Cho) and David (Alan Kim), are transplant recipients. In the 1980s, reversing the path of an earlier migration, Dust Bowl, the family, originally from South Korea, left California to engage in farming near the Ozarks. The parents (Steven Yeun and Yeri Han) work as chicken sexeurs at a local poultry processing plant, but Jacob has entrepreneurial ambitions. Every year, he explains to his wife, 30,000 Koreans come to the United States and he wants to cultivate the kind of products that will make them taste like home.
“Minari” is part of the story of his struggle to get the business off the ground. The moods and rhythms of the film – the gentle intensity of the scenes, the way the plot emerges from hard work, close attention and the mysterious operations of the natural world – feel ingrained in agrarian life.
That doesn’t mean everyone is happy on the farm. The house is a trailer wedged in the middle of a meadow, far from any neighbor. The isolation bothers Monica, who is not entirely convinced of her husband’s plans. David, the youngest, has heart disease which amplifies his mother’s concerns. “Stop running!” she scolds him, an order almost impossible for a 7 year old boy in a large space to obey.
The house expands – and the film takes on layers of intergenerational drama and domestic comedy – with the arrival of Monica’s mother Soonja (Yuh-Jung Youn). Children are put off by her old-fashioned ways and the weird things she eats and drinks. “She’s not like a real grandmother,” complains David. “She doesn’t make cookies.” But the two forge a wary and increasingly close sitcom-style bond. Soonja teaches his grandson a card game that involves a lot of Korean expletives, and he introduces him to the pleasures of Mountain Dew.
There are many other things happening, some are predictable, some are not. A warm feeling of familiarity is one of the charms of the film. The chronicle of an immigrant family, often told through the eyes of a child, is a staple of American literature and popular culture. But every family – every family member, for that matter – has a distinct set of experiences and memories, and loyalty to those is what makes ‘Minari’, in its circumspect, sweet, touching and downright manner. revealing.
It’s not just that Chung, a Korean-American filmmaker in his 40s who grew up on a farm in Arkansas, is leaning on what he knows. Any film buff knows that real life can too easily be falsified by melodrama or drowned in sentimentality. There is certainly a lot of emotion here; Jacob, who has problems with his well, could irrigate his crops to the tears of the public. But Chung’s touch is neat and precise. Everything is weighed. Nothing is wasted.
There is no need – no time, no room – for cultural generalizations. David and Anne, during their first meetings with other children, are made aware of their difference. “Why is your face so flat?” a white boy asks David. It almost sounds like an innocent question. A girl tells nonsense syllables to Anne, saying “stop me when I say something in your language”, which happens one way or another. But exoticism can be a two-way mirror, and America is a pretty strange place. Jacob scoffs at the local practice of fetching water with dowsing sticks, which offends his sense of rationality.
He also befriends Paul (Will Patton), a middle-aged man who served in Korea with the US military and tries to banish evil spirits from Yis property through prayer. Paul’s eccentricities – on Sundays, when his neighbors are at church, he carries a homemade crucifix along the back roads – are appreciated rather than ridiculed. People are different after all.
Even members of the same family. “Minari” does not insist on making his characters representative of something other than themselves. Youn is a sneaky stage thief, but so is her character, who imbues her daughter’s home with mischief, folk wisdom, and mostly unexpressed memories of war, poverty, and other hardships.
She is tough but kind and wise because she has lived a long time and seen a lot. David and Anne – the big sister is a somewhat overlooked figure in this group portrait – are as open as satellite dishes, gathering information from all corners of the known universe and decoding it as best they can. The grandmother and her grandchildren are free in a way that Jacob and Monica are not, surrounded as they are by responsibilities, anxieties and promises that can be difficult to keep.
Jacob is a traditional patriarch, but he’s also a young man who took a huge risk, and his struggle to become a new version of himself is the dramatic heart of the film. Yeun, an effortless magnetic actor, finds the cracks in the character’s carefully cultivated reserve, the great unstable emotions behind the facade of stoicism.
It all sounds simple and straightforward. “Minari” is modest, specific and economical, just like the lives he investigates. There is nothing small, however, as it functions on the true scale of life.
Threatening
Classified PG-13. In Korean and English, with subtitles. Duration: 1 hour 55 minutes. In theaters. Please review the guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before watching movies in theaters.
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