Review: Minari Is a Tender, If Too Neat, Portrait of an Immigrant Experience

The film’s orderliness of plot somewhat undermines the sense that the family at its center is steeped in a truly messy situation.

Minari
Photo: A24

Today, a Hollywood studio film about an Asian family settling in the American South in the 1980s would most likely tend toward melodrama, fixating on the evils of racism and assailing audiences with lugubrious depictions of unfeeling prejudice only to lift us up with the bold stands that its protagonists make against it. Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari, based on the Colorado-born writer-director’s own childhood experience of moving with his Korean immigrant parents to Lincoln, Arkansas, isn’t interested in that kind of dramatic grandiosity, though its evident belief in a liberal rendition of the American dream keeps it well within the film industry’s safe zone, both dramatically and ideologically speaking.

Chung’s avatar here is David (Alan Kim), a seven-year-old boy with a heart defect whose father, Jacob (Steven Yeun), has moved the family out to rural Arkansas to realize his dream of becoming a self-made farmer. It’s a plan whose details he apparently hasn’t shared with anyone in the family, as David’s mother, Monica (Yeri Han), is shocked both to see the raised prefab house in the empty plot of land they’ll be living on, and to hear Jacob proclaim to David and his older sister, Anne (Noel Kate Cho), that he’s going to be planting a “big garden” in front of the home—by which he means a produce farm whose harvest he can sell to Korean markets. Initially reluctant to accept help or embrace American farming methods, Jacob relents and hires Paul (Will Patton), an eccentric, born-again local, to work alongside him.

As Jacob, a man on the cusp of middle age whose anxiety to make something of himself blinds him to his family’s unhappiness, Yeun demonstrates his versatility as an actor in his first film performance since Lee Chang-dong’s Burning. Though Jacob is caring, he’s unable to reflect on his own domineering attitudes, as he presumes control over his family’s direction. Minari’s most powerful moments are those that find the highly competent Jacob confronting things that he can’t change or manipulate: the limitations of the water table beneath his land, the economics of local Korean markets, and his wife’s justified feelings of betrayal and frustration at his tunnel-visioned dream of running a private farm powered by unalienated labor.

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As a compromise to alleviate Monica’s misery, Steven agrees to have her mother, Soonja (Youn Yuh-jung), move in with them. In the young David’s eyes, this woman—who can’t bake cookies and is revealed to have an irreverent, mischievous streak—is hardly a “real grandmother.” Minari’s second plotline, which parallels Jacob’s struggles to get his farm going, is David’s gradual, begrudging acceptance of Soonja’s presence. It’s this plot that informs the film’s title, as David’s grandmother takes him to a creek bed in the nearby forest where she plants minari, an easily cultivated herb that, Soonja extols, keeps both the rich and poor healthy.

The story told from David’s perspective goes about demonstrating this central metaphor but, in the end, doesn’t carry the emotional weight that Yuen lends David’s struggles with the farm. Kim is by no means the worst child performer, but Chung’s decision to make David the point-of-view character means that much has to be communicated through the tiny actor’s limited range. Without a strong point of emotional identification in David, it’s apparent how every story element fits neatly into a row, like a carefully planned field of produce, as Minari reaches its climax. Even David’s anxiety-induced bedwetting has a narrative payoff.

This orderliness of plot somewhat undermines the sense that the family is steeped in a truly messy situation. It also foregrounds the way that Minari fits into familiar structures—that it’s not aiming to do much more than give a specifically Korean American spin to a more or less standard cultural narrative about the struggle against the land to make oneself anew in America. Perhaps aptly, there’s something Reagan-esque about the ideals of an individualist America that underlie the story. Nevertheless, Chung’s quasi-autobiographical look at an Asian American family making their way on the edge of the Arkansas wilderness serves as a reminder that white people don’t have a monopoly on the pastoral imagination.

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Score: 
 Cast: Steven Yeun, Alan Kim, Yeri Han, Youn Yuh-jung, Noel Kate Cho, Will Patton  Director: Lee Isaac Chung  Screenwriter: Lee Isaac Chung  Distributor: A24  Running Time: 105 min  Rating: PG-13  Year: 2020  Buy: Video

Pat Brown

Pat Brown teaches Film Studies and American Studies in Germany. His writing on film and media has appeared in various scholarly journals and critical anthologies.

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