Minari is a green leafy vegetable (sometimes called celery or drop herb) popular in Korean cuisine. In Lee Isaac Chung’s adorable new film, it flourishes in an Arkansas stream bed, providing a title, precise detail and perhaps also a metaphor.
Like the minari, Jacob and Monica Yi and their two children, Anne (Noel Kate Cho) and David (Alan Kim), are transplants. In the 1980s, reversing the path of a previous migration, Dust Bowl, the family, originally from South Korea, left California to pursue agriculture near Ozarks. Parents (Steven Yeun and Yeri Han) work as chicken sexers at a local poultry processing plant, but Jacob has entrepreneurial ambitions. Each year, he explains to his wife, 30,000 Koreans arrive in the United States and he wants to grow the type of produce that will give them the taste of home.
“Minari” is partly the story of his struggle to get the business off the ground. The moods and rhythms of the film – the soft intensity of the scenes, the way the plot emerges from hard work, careful attention and the mysterious operations of the natural world – seem rooted in agrarian life.
This does not mean that everyone is happy on the farm. Home is a trailer supported in the middle of a meadow, away from any neighbor. The isolation bothers Monica, who does not fully agree with her husband’s plans. David, the youngest son, has a heart condition that increases his mother’s concern. “Stop running!” she scolds him, an order that is almost impossible for a 7-year-old boy to obey in an open space.
The family expands – and the film takes on layers of intergenerational drama and home comedy – with the arrival of Monica’s mother, Soonja (Yuh-Jung Youn). Children are disconcerted by her old country habits and the strange things she eats and drinks. “She’s not like a real grandmother,” complains David. “She doesn’t make cookies.” But the two create a cautious and ever closer link to the sitcom style. Soonja teaches his grandson a card game that involves many Korean bad words and he introduces her to the pleasures of Mountain Dew.
Much more happens, some of them predictable, others 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 hallmark of American literature and popular culture. But each family – each member of the family, by the way – has a distinct set of experiences and memories, and loyalty to them is what makes “Minari”, in his circumspect, gentle, moving and totally revealing way.
It’s not just that Chung, a 40-year-old Korean-American filmmaker who grew up on a farm in Arkansas, is turning to what he knows. Any movie watcher knows that real life can be easily distorted by melodrama or drowned in sentimentality. There is certainly a lot of excitement here; Jacob, who has some problems with his well, can irrigate his crops with the public’s tears. But Chung’s touch is careful and accurate. Everything is heavy. Nothing is wasted.
There is no need – without time, without space – for cultural generalizations. David and Anne, in their first encounters with other children, are told that they are different. “Why is your face so flat?” a white boy asks David. It seems almost an innocent question. A girl recites meaningless syllables to Anne, saying “stop me when I say something in your language”, which somehow happens. But exoticism can be a two-way mirror, and America is a very strange place. Jacob scoffs at the local practice of looking for water with dowsing wands, which offends his sense of rationality.
He also befriends Paul (Will Patton), a middle-aged fellow who served in Korea with the U.S. Army and who tries to banish the evil spirits from Yis’s estate with prayers. Paul’s eccentricities – on Sunday, while his neighbors are at church, he carries a homemade crucifix on the back roads – are more appreciated than ridiculed. After all, people are different.
Even members of the same family. “Minari” does not insist on making his characters representative of anything but themselves. Youn is an astute scene-stealer, but this is also true in her character, who infuses her daughter’s home with mischief, popular wisdom and mostly unspoken memories of war, poverty and other difficulties.
She is tough, but kind and wise because she has lived and seen a lot. David and Anne – the older sister is a somewhat neglected figure in this group portrait – are as open as satellite dishes, collecting information from every corner of the known universe and decoding it in the best possible way. The grandmother and grandchildren are free in a way that Jacob and Monica are not, imprisoned as they are for responsibilities, anxieties and promises that can be difficult to keep.
Jacob is a traditional patriarch, but also a young man who has taken an enormous risk, and his struggle to grow into 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 large and unstable emotions behind the stoicism facade.
Everything seems simple and straightforward. “Minari” is modest, specific and economical, like the lives it examines. However, there is nothing small about it, because it operates on the true scale of life.
Minari
PG-13 classification. In Korean and English, with subtitles. Execution time: 1 hour and 55 minutes. In theaters. Consult the guidelines set by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before watching movies in theaters.