Tender and authentic, Minari is a powerful elixir of cinema

Writer and filmmaker Lee Isaac Chung’s semi-autobiographical drama Minari, which follows a Korean American family adjusting to rural life in Arkansas, is the best film of the year. With equal parts melancholy, optimism, and tenderness, the film finds poetic balm within the chase for the American dream. Minor spoilers ahead…

Jacob Yi (Steven Yeun) tends to his new land. An immigrant who has relocated his family from sunny California to rural Arkansas, he’s given up a meager-but-comfortable living in a Stateside Korean community to chase the American dream - to build something for himself. Jacob has scraped every penny, nickel, and dime to the family name for a slice of farmland, but now he’s facing a bewildering problem: The crops won’t take to the soil no matter how much he breaks his back over the fields. A man whose pride and gumption have uprooted his Asian family to the mostly-white pastoral of the Ozarks, Jacob finds his agricultural roadblock to be a perfect metaphor for the difficulty of assimilation, and one that’s pulled straight from filmmaker Lee Isaac Chung’s past. The director’s new film, Minari, is a semi-autobiographical tale that delivers a potent mix of wonder, heartache, and nostalgic tenderness - and while it is indeed a narrative about the need to make something of yourself, it can also be seen as a story about a family trying to find its footing in foreignness, and in turn a story about a man trying to find his place in that family. A universally recognizable struggle threaded with a wistful cultural specificity, Minari is cinematic balm, and my favorite film of the year.

It would make perfect sense for Minari to be told through the perspective of Jacob, but much of the film is actually seen through the eyes of seven-year old David (the wonderful Alan S. Kim), the youngest of the Yi family and a stand-in for Chung himself. Children of immigrants - especially second-generation Asian Americans like myself - will form an instant, empathic bond with Kim’s precocious performance: A Mountain Dew-guzzling wrestling fan who runs around in his cowboy boots, David has grown up with no inkling of Korea, experiencing his parents’ hardships and his own roots from a remove. As soon as the Yis step foot in Arkansas, however, things begin to change, and David is pushed to grapple with both sides of his heritage. There’s a piercing chemistry David shares with his costars that’s difficult to put into a word other than “real,” and as a child actor, Alan S. Kim is a revelation. Perfectly conveying a mix of wit, naïveté, and vulnerability, Kim avoids the over-acting that riddles other young performances, instead expertly selling David as a regular - and convincing - kid.

“A universally recognizable struggle threaded with a wistful cultural specificity, *Minari* is cinematic balm, and my favorite film of the year.”

Pulling up to the new rural homestead, Jacob’s wife Monica (Han Ye-ri) is appalled that their ramshackle abode rests upon four wheels - it’s a far cry from her husband’s fervent pitch for the American dream. And as the crops start failing on the land that drove its previous owner to suicide, tensions begin to flare between the couple. Increasingly missing the city as her husband continually prioritizes - in her eyes - the farm over family, Monica strikes a compromise: the family will invite her mother Soon-ja (Youn Yuh-jung) to fly in from South Korea to stay with them and alleviate their feelings of isolation. Grandma is an instant presence within Minari, and Youn undoubtedly gives the film its most impassioned performance. Silly and strict, wise and lewd, and wholly rough around the edges, Soon-ja is a walking paradox - like many Asian grandmothers can be - and she strikes a resonant chord of authenticity.

David immediately bristles at his grandmother’s intrusion, resenting her for failing the American requisites of being a grandparent: she doesn’t speak English, she doesn't bake, and she has a distinctive “Korean smell.” But soon afterwards, the relationship between David and his grandmother grows into something more as Soon-ja is able to impart her wisdom through equal parts gross-out humor and sage advice. And there’s no advice more fruitful than the lesson that gives the film its namesake: Continuing the film’s agrarian metaphor, Soon-ja is the one that teaches David how to plant and cultivate minari, a foreign water dropwart that grows as well in American soil as it does Korean. A resilient plant that acts as the film’s spiritual effigy, it draws an affecting throughline with the steely properties required to make an unforgiving new environment a home.

“Grandma is an instant presence within *Minari*, and [Youn Yuh-jung] undoubtedly gives the film its most impassioned performance.”

Lee Isaac Chung clearly draws Minari from a well of experience, infusing the film with a cultural specificity that veers towards authenticity rather than melodrama. David and his sister Anne (Noel Kate Cho) - along with their parents - are immediately seen as outsiders in their very-white Arkansas town, but instead of overtly hurtful racism, the Yis experience prejudice mostly through stinging barbs of ignorance. Anne is on the receiving end of a “ching chong” chant, while another boy asks David, “Why is your face so flat?” Mostly enamored by the prospect of making new white friends, the kids aren’t really able to perceive how hurtful these words can be. Even Jacob and Monica are the target of veiled micro-aggressions, as most of their church congregation speak to their otherness rather than their humanity. In the end, Minari is a film about Korean Americans crafted by a Korean American, teeming with naturalism and details that extend way beyond the scope of laudable representation. Without hanging lampshades or delivering heavy-handed cultural references, Chung is able to craft poignant moments that rest upon precision. When Soon-ja first arrives, she brings with her a whole bevy of foods and spices from Korea, and Monica breaks down in tears; David is forced to drink his grandmother’s foul concoctions from the homeland; and Jacob laments his years wasted as a chicken sexer in California - it’s intimate moments like these that convey Chung’s strength as a filmmaker, demonstrating the quiet ideal of representation.

My parents came to the United States nearly forty years ago with nothing but a few dollars in their pockets and the hopes of a dream. My father held a series of odd jobs - selling pet goldfish, repairing antiques, delivering take-out - to provide for us, and like Jacob, he eventually aspired to build something for himself. And I, like David, followed along, really none the wiser to my parents’ struggles. It’s here, in Minari’s wallop of an ending, that sent me reeling. A touching reminiscence that acknowledges the older generation as flesh and blood humans, Chung’s conclusion looks back with a newfound fondness, reflecting upon his parents’ love, compassion, and the hardships they went through - all things he didn’t fully know how to appreciate in the moment. With its nuance, lived-in details, and soulful performances, Minari reflects my own self in a myriad of depictions. It’s the rare film brimming with love, care, and empathy; it might devastate you, but it will also spend the effort to put you back together again, stronger than before.