Minari (2020)
Review of Minari, directed by Lee Isaac Chung
I’ve been meaning to watch Minari for a hot minute now, ever since I knew it had come out in theaters. I never had the opportunity to actually go and see it on a big screen, and while I procrastinated on the streaming aspect of it, I finally managed to get onto Showtime, sign up for the free trial to see Everything Everywhere All At Once, and then realized Minari was on there as well.
My one confession in life is that every time I see Steven Yeun in a movie, I’m reminded of that one time freshman year of college when I went to go see Burning at Quad Cinema in New York.
No one was talking about that movie then, and here I was at this small little theater in the middle of the village. Steven Yeun showed up to our screening, which had like fifteen people max in this tiny room, and I remember thinking that this was the dream I always wanted to live while as a kid in Baltimore.
AKA: feeling like a sophisticated NYC person casually going to intimate talkbacks with actors. On the way out Steven and I did that awkward thing of you go first while motioning to the door, which I recall as being so awkward, hence the trauma. I thought of that immediately while watching Minari.
Anyways, here’s the review!
A Korean American family decides to start over on a farm in Arkansas.
Minari is a movie that is very autobiographical in nature, as the director bases it off of his own life and how his family chose to relocate in order to find a better life somewhere else.
Here, Steven Yeun portrays the patriarch who brings his family to a small home on wheels, which his wife reels at, in order to start his own farming operation. His wife, Monica, and he get jobs sorting chicks based on their gender, where they meet another Korean woman who works there. Steven’s character, Jacob, is efficient at the job, quickly sorting the chicks, showing initially how he has come into this ecosystem with some skills in hand.
Monica is very skeptical of all of this however, and we begin to see the cracks in their marriage throughout the show.
The couple has two children: David and Anne. Of course they both have traditional and biblical names, as the Yi family is very religious. Monica brings the family to church in order to find comfort in their new surroundings.
We don’t see much of Anne throughout the movie outside of her being a mouthpiece to explain things to David, or telling him not to do things, but we learn fairly early on that David has heart problems. He’s essentially not allowed to act like a kid since he can’t run around.
When they show up to a church party, too, the other kids their age ask ignorant questions since the general attitude in these parts is racist—I imagine there weren’t many Asians until this moment around there, so that kind of explains why.
The first part of the movie focuses on how Jacob digs a well to start his operations, then hires a guy named Paul who is seen by crazy in the rest of the town. Paul is a Korean War veteran and mentions some familiarity and love for the culture, which is probably why he manages to worm his way into Jacob’s heart pretty quickly.
An early marker between chapters is when Monica’s mother arrives, and she’s brash, loud, and questions their decisions to go to church.
While Monica apologizes for where they live, she doesn’t seem to care. She goes to the riverside and plants the minari seeds she grew in Korea, which then begin to sprout rapidly.
Jacob decides he’s going to use the farm to grow Korean crops. As David’s grandmother, Monica’s mother, encourages him to break the rules and act like a boy, a trip to another town reveals that he’s actually more healthy than usual. I took this moment as showing the example of being freer, not living life so diligently.
Exert caution, yes, but the family as a whole was holding themselves back. Monica is the hesitant one out of them all, which makes sense because she literally left Korea, her mother, and her home in order to chase after a better life. Minari is kind of a symbol for resilience in this movie.
It’s technically an invasive species, which sucks for the wildlife around there probably, but the decision to stay at the end of the film by the family reflects this resilience.
Not only does the minari represent hope, even after the grandmother suffers a stroke and the barn holding all their wares burns down, but it implies that in the future the family is going to thrive as well. It might not be immediately, but one has to plant seeds, cultivate them, and take time.
The Yi family will do just fine, beating the odds at the end of the day. This is such a relatively straightforward movie, and I think the symbolism and themes overall are pretty obvious. It’s a tender story though, and has more depth upon what appears on the surface.
Overall Thoughts
I’m glad I finally got to watch this movie! I really liked Minari and thought it was a refreshing movie that shows another side of the American experience.
It reminds me of this fascinating documentary I was watching awhile back about how in the Deep South there were a ton of Chinese immigrants and the elderly community in a dying town consisted of Asian-American elders.
You can really tell in movies like Minari that they’re personal stories from the way the characters are crafted. It’s a shame that this movie didn’t get more acknowledgement in the long run when it came to awards and whatnot, but I think Minari fell so movies like Everything Everywhere All At Once could fly.
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