Minari

A quietly heartrending story about the American Dream

BY DAVID MA

Directed by Lee Isaac Chung, Minari is the tale of a family of Korean immigrants attempting to make a life for themselves in rural Arkansas. Steven Yeun stars as Jacob, the father in a family composed of his wife Monica, Monica’s mother, and their two children David and Anne. Jacob dreams of cultivating a farm growing Korean vegetables that he can sell to other Korean immigrants. Still, he soon finds his dream in conflict with the desires of his family members. The everyday lives of the Yi family are depicted with a quiet and observant angle. While perhaps the pacing and writing can border on being too subtle, the ultimate product is a film that distills a slice of what it means to be human.

When one is presented with a film directed by a Korean-American starring Koreans speaking Korean, there’s a tendency to view the movie through nothing but a racial lens. Although Asian- American-ness has been increasingly spotlighted recently, Minari doesn’t touch on the question of Asian-American identity very overtly. There are a couple scenes of vague racial discomfort, but no characters act with the motivation of racial malice. There’s no scene wherein the grandmother is knocked to the ground, nor a scene where someone spits on Jacob, calls him a chink, and tells him to go back to China. Although such events very much happen in real life, no doubt their inclusions would be criticized as being heavy-handed. That’s not to say that the movie doesn’t say anything about race, of course. It simply depicts the Yi family’s Korean identity through a more subtle lens, maintaining it as one thread amongst many that interweave the narrative.

Just as prominent a thread is the question of the American Dream, which Lee Isaac Chung does not sugarcoat. There are moments of happiness and flashes of joy, but so too are there tragic accidents and quiet outbursts of grief. It is not a scathing critique of America, but nor is it a patriotic celebration. Even the end of the movie provides no particular resolution, no resounding statement that all will be ok and that the family will live happily ever after. The chronic tensions between Jacob and Monica throughout the narrative have not been entirely resolved. One can easily surmise that they will continue for the rest of the characters’ lives. But such is the way of the world, is it not? At its core, Minari is deeply personal, striking at those chords that carry forth great films. All it does is portray the struggles and labor of an immigrant family as they attempt to make a life for themselves. Still, it does so in a way that elicits sympathy and a swell of emotion. It weighs love against comfort. It weighs family against pride. It takes fundamental ideals of the heart and puts them to the test.

While Lee Isaac Chung wanted to avoid putting too much of the focus on the son to prevent projecting too many of his own perspectives, some still leak through. Even beyond the coincidentally shared name, many scenes involving David resonated with me, as they might with many children born to immigrants. The generational gap between David and his grandma, born of his desires for American- ness, powerfully evokes that familiar sense of living on the border of two different worlds. Distilled through his childhood lens, Minari offers no answer to how to navigate such questions but merely renders them in innocent detail.

I watched Minari in my mom’s company, who immigrated to the US with my dad in the 90’s. While many aspects of her journey differed from that of the Yi’s - we ended up in a suburb, for example - there were fundamental similarities inherent to almost every immigrant journey. The struggle of assimilation, the difficulties of finding a place to fit in, and above all, the uncertainty of one’s future.

Minari’s title refers to a Korean plant known for its resilience and thus obviously serves as a metaphor for perseverance. Resilience is another thread carried throughout the film, even as Jacob and Monica are pushed to their wits’ end by the harsh reality of their reality. While they do not face their uncertain future with unbridled optimism, they face it nonetheless. Honestly, what more can we ask for?