Review: Minari
Sometimes we need to raze the ground and start fresh. This idea works both as a metaphor and as a literal activity that takes place in Lee Isaac Chung’s autobiographical Korean film, Minari, one of the year’s most beautiful films. Like so many families before theirs, the Yi family (based on Chung’s real-life family) is looking for a new life and new opportunities in America where they’ve moved to raise their children and start anew. There are veiled references to the Korean war and a life they escaped when they moved to America in the 80s when this film is set.
Jacob’s (played by Steven Yeun) dreams go beyond living in America, though. He wants to own land and start his own farm, so he moves his family from California where he and his wife work at a chicken hatchery, to Arkansas. He wants to lay claim to something that he is willing to build with his own blood, sweat, and tears. But when he realizes running a successful farm is more than he bargained for, tensions rise as his wife, Monica (Yeri Han) and two young kids, Anne (Noel Kate Cho) and David (Alan Kim) begin to wonder if they can have a life there without enormous struggle.
When Jacob agrees to allow Monica’s mother to move in with them, (a career-defining performance from Yuh-Jung Youn) the smaller trailer the family squeezes into on their land feels even smaller. It’s at this point in the story that cultures collide as the American-born kids, David and Anne are now living with a grandmother they barely know and who might as well have come from a different planet.
Jacob’s tenacity in the face of disillusionment is a beautiful picture of the immigrant experience - a reckoning with the American dream. We’re also reminded it’s not without sacrifice. As Monica’s mother, Soonja, disrupts their life even further, we see some of the family’s darkest moments. Chung is able to walk a tonal tightrope by letting us experience it partially through the eyes of young David (his avatar in the film) who straddles these two worlds - feeling disoriented by a grandma from a foreign land and watching his father fight his way towards greater independence.
Overall the film is washed over with love and forgiveness, much like Jacob’s farm, some days bring drought, and some days bring abundance.