A24
When it comes to indie films, is there any phrase more potentially concerned than ‘an autobiographical story about the director’? Not to say that there is a huge number of such movies really, but it’s a tricky thing to tell a story that’s essentially about yourself without coming off as pretentious or annoying. But just because it’s difficult doesn’t mean it’s impossible.
Minari comes from writer/director Lee Isaac Chung, and it is in fact inspired by his own childhood. It’s the early 1980s and the Yi family (who are Korean-Americans) have just moved from their expat community in California to the middle of nowhere in Arkansas. Yi patriarch Jacob (Steven Yeun) has a dream to sell a crop of home grown Korean produce to the community in Dallas, hoping to elevate his family’s lives and improve things for his children.
Along with him are his wife Monica (Han Ye-ri), who is worried about the farm idea and their isolated small new home, and kids — older sister Anne (Noel Kate Cho) and younger brother David (Alan Kim). Although we follow much of Jacob’s journey through his successes and many failures on his new farm, the main point of view for much of the film is little David.
For a while, we get a sense of the potential new life for the Yi family, as the parents get a local job of manual labor while constantly arguing about the whole farm idea. David tries to make friends at school, encountering racism of levels both obviously bigoted and unintentionally so (like someone talking about how cool they think Bruce Lee is).
The movie kicks a jumpstart of energy when it introduces Monica’s mother Soon-ja (Youn Yuh-jung), a feisty old lady who’s come from Korea to help watch the kids since the parents are always working. Although Soon-ja is an atypical grandmother from what David expects from pop culture, she has a rough sense of humor and more knowledge than David realizes.
We get a connection to the big theme of the movie as Soon-ja takes the kids off into the woods to show them how to plant minari (a leafy green plant most commonly translated as Java water dropwort). The plant can thrive in the wild quite easily, often near marshy areas where few edible things grow, and there’s certainly a direct metaphor about immigrants and assimilation into the US.
The movie goes into directions that are often quite sad and emotionally affecting, as we see the idea of the American dream conflict with survival and happiness. Most of the movie is in Korean, with snippets of English throughout — the parents don’t speak it well and the grandmother almost not at all, so the kids end up translating. It’s another layer of the metaphor, the generational divide that also serves as a bridge between assimilation and tradition.
Although I really thought Youn Yuh-jung was the best actor here as the grandmother that immediately connected me to her character, the kids were pretty good — both were quite naturalistic without being performative, always tricky for child actors. But there’s something key here too, a strength of the immigrant struggle against the system that makes things so hard — and the beauty of the potential of success against all odds. It’s the plant, the Minari, that grows more than you could ever imagine.
Minari has a run time of 1 hour 55 minutes and rated PG-13 for some thematic elements and a rude gesture.
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