Directed by: Lee Isaac Chung
Starring: Steven Yeun, Yeri Han, Alan Kim, Yuh-jung Youn, Noel Kate Cho
Rated PG-13, 115 minutes
Before it was even released, Lee Isaac Chung’s semi-autobiographical film “Minari” had already generated controversy. While the film is many things—warm, nostalgic, often surprisingly funny—it isn’t scandalous. Instead, the controversy came in the form of the Golden Globes, whose governing body decided the film would be ineligible for the Best Motion Picture award, as the movie is mostly in Korean. Overnight, “Minari” became the latest emblem of latent racism in Hollywood, the Globes’ decision a dubious assertion that anything not in English is inherently “foreign.”
The irony, of course, is that “Minari” was made by Americans, in America. And more to the point, how can any story, regardless of language, be considered foreign if it takes place here? Like 2016’s “Moonlight,” whose release (coinciding with Donald Trump’s election) added a heavy political weight to its humble narrative of Black queerness, “Minari” now bears the weight of a social and political reckoning on its shoulders. Lucky for us, it carries that weight with uncommon grace.
At the heart of the movie is a young boy, David (first-time actor Alan Kim), through whose eyes we watch the gradual acclimation of his Korean family to a rural farming town in 1980s Arkansas. David’s father, Jacob Yi (Steven Yeun, “The Walking Dead”), has brought his family to this remote place in order to escape a drab existence in California and start his own farm. David, his mother, Monica (Yeri Han, “Worst Woman”), and his older sister, Anne (Noel Kate Cho, another first-timer), are all dragged along for the journey, forced to make the most of their strange new home.
The story rises and falls in gentle waves. Monica’s mother, Soonja (Yuh-jung Youn, “The Housemaid”), comes to live with them and moves into David’s bedroom, much to the boy’s chagrin; Jacob hires a local Korean War veteran and ultra-devout Christian to help out on the farm; the Yis go to church, and face water shortages, and deal with bed-wetting incidents. David has a heart condition that Monica anxiously monitors, afraid that any physical exertion could kill the boy. Soonja, meanwhile, plants minari seeds by a creek. Life, in its simplicity and its specificity, goes on.
There’s a lyrical quality to “Minari,” in that certain repetitions—of symbols, colors, actions—accumulate and add layers to the Yis’ journey. The movie is filled with lush greens and frail yellows, water and the lack thereof, and various forms of religious and non-religious faith. Through these and myriad hardships both external and self-imposed, the Yis test the strength of the ties that bind, sometimes to the point of breaking. In a late scene, they all sleep together on the living room floor after a calamitous night; we feel their exhaustion, but also great relief.
An excellent cast powers the film, drawing out our empathy. The young Alan Kim’s David is immediately recognizable, a naive boy embarrassed by his grandma and unafraid to tell her so, while also deeply and innocently dependent on the adults around him. Steven Yeun’s Jacob, the reason for the upending of all their lives, is aloof and uncompromising and proud, while Yeri Han’s Monica stoically shoulders the domestic burden her husband has dropped on her until she can take it no longer. When she finally tells Jacob “I’ve lost my faith in you,” the silence that falls between them is as heavy and forlorn as a graveyard. But then there is Yuh-jung Youn’s goofy, smack-talking Soonja, and Noel Kate Cho’s reserved, matter-of-fact Anne; and in all these characters, in these actors’ expressions and mannerisms, there are hints of rich interior lives, internal monologues just underneath the surface. Lee Isaac Chung (“Munyurangabo”) has created characters that leap from the screen.
“Minari” is Chung’s tale of the American Dream, but even that label feels reductive. The movie doesn’t lament anti-Asian racism, but it acknowledges white ignorance; there’s no grandstanding against capitalism, but there’s poverty and needless suffering; the Yis take pride in their land, but also harbor a fervent wish that it might bear better fruit. “Minari” capably answers the political pressure surrounding its reception, but it’s also a convincing argument that politics doesn’t exist in the abstract. The story of the Yis feels universal precisely because it’s as specific and tangibly felt as the story of any real family.
Originally published in The Harvard Press on 3/5/21.