“Minari” is currently being shown through a Private Screening Room on the A24 website through March 7.
My family immigrated to the United States from Vietnam in 1995. Seeking new opportunities in life and following the so-called American Dream, they came over here with nothing but hopes and aspirations.
My mom and dad, along with my grandparents, bought a house on the corner of Racine St. in Aurora, CO. It was a small beat-down-home; however, it came with the biggest backyard in the neighborhood.
Growing up, I’ve always mulled over the photographs they took when they came here. The backyard was bare-bones, with nothing occupying the space but weeds and dirt. Looking at it now, you can’t tell that it is the same backyard. Today, it’s a garden closed off by gorgeous greenery, flowers and vegetables.
This is a story that I never thought I would see in an American film.
“Minari” is a semi-autobiographical film by Lee Isaac Chung, and it follows a newly-immigrated Korean family navigating their American Dream in rural Arkansas during the 1980s.
Jacob (Steven Yeun) and Monica Yi (Han Ye-ri) move from California to Arkansas to seek new opportunities for their children, David (Alan S. Kim) and Anne (Noel Cho). The parents work as chicken sexers for a poultry processing plant to support the family. However, with aspirations of his own, Jacob strives to cultivate a farm on the 50-acres of land that the family lives on.
Told from David’s perspective, the film centers around his personal battles as a Korean-American kid hampered with a heart defect. Viewers are introduced to Monica’s mother, Soonja (Youn Yuh-jung), who moves in with the family and does everything Korean. “She smells like Korea,” David complains.
She curses, wears men’s underwear and doesn’t know how to bake cookies, and this is everything a grandma should and shouldn’t be able to do in David’s eyes. This relationship is forced upon David by his mother, which he rejects at first because of his idealistic version of an “American grandma.” When he is first introduced, he does not greet her and is thrown off by the presence of this grandma figure he has never had before.
Their relationship continues to spiral as they have to learn to coexist with one another. Soonja continually teases David out of love, yet he doesn’t recognize this and thinks she’s despicable. David rebels in disrespectful ways, introducing her to “Mountain Dew” (he pees into her cup) and insulting her while she sleeps.
Soonja continues to work on her relationship with David and defends him from his father’s spanking. Soonja inevitably finds her way into David’s heart and when she does, their relationship blossoms.
Jacob’s central conflict is furthered when he yearns to grow Korean vegetables and fruit on his family’s unforgiving land. He hopes this endeavor will prove to his family that he can succeed. He befriends Paul (Will Patton), an overzealous Christian man, to help him build this farm. Life is never a walk in the park for Jacob, as he struggles to balance his family, the farm and their never-ending financial troubles. Throughout the film, Jacob and Monica struggle to understand each other’s perspective, quarreling with each other about the probable success of the farm at the expense of the family. These scenes are vigorous as both actors embody their characters well.
These intergenerational conflicts are beautifully executed as the cast nails every single performance. Yeun crafts his career-best performance as his character grapples with dreams at the cost of family. Yuh-jung takes on the Korean grandma role with comedic relief the film needs. Even newcomer Kim exercises veteran-acting techniques with every ounce of energy a six-year-old boy could have.
What Chung does wonderfully in this film is capture the essence of a dream. The cinematography is tender, delicately following the family in every frame. That, along with a carefully-composed soundtrack by Emile Mosseri, feeds into the fantasy-like quality that the film carries. The children soak in this new atmosphere with adolescent innocence, and the grandma finds fascinations with things foreign to her such as Mountain Dew or American boxing.
Minari is a Korean vegetable also known as water dropwort or Chinese celery. In the film, the grandma takes David down to a creek and plants minari. It is not until the end of the film that viewers see the abundance of minari that has grown. It is a plant that is capable of growing in poor conditions, and this lends itself to many metaphors behind the “Minari” name the film is titled after.
Much like minari, the Yi family immigrated to America with little-to-nothing but are able to make something out of this vast, rural American landscape.
“Minari” is a beautiful film, the best of the 2020 releases. But what makes it special isn’t Chung’s direction, the cast’s performances or the heavenly score. It is meaningful and rare because it tells an American story that doesn’t normally get cinema recognition. It received some appreciation at the Golden Globes, as it won best foreign-language film, but it was disqualified from the best picture category.
The film is mostly in Korean but draws heavily on American ideals and dreams. This is a story that my family and thousands of others can relate to as Asian-Americans who have planted their roots in America. For the Yi family, it was minari—how many more roots have we to discover?
