Minari

“Filial piety is alive and well in Asian American content.”

Title: Minari (2020)
Director: Lee Isaac Chung 👨🏻🇺🇸
Writer: Lee Isaac Chung 👨🏻🇺🇸

Reviewed by Li 👩🏻🇺🇸

2/3/2021: Updated Race category

Technical: 5/5

This year, Sundance Film Festival combed through 15,100 submissions and gave 128 feature films a shot at Grand Jury Prizes, but there could only be one U.S. Dramatic winner—and that film was Minari, from Korean American director Lee Isaac Chung.

Based loosely on Chung’s own upbringing on a rural farm in Arkansas, this tale of American grit and the loneliness of the immigrant experience reverberates with cyclical devices: The turning over of seasons; three generations sharing a cramped mobile home; health and sickness; and even the daily grind of unglamorous jobs like sorting chickens all lend an ambulatory experience heavily grounded in the universality of rinse and repeat.

Chung drew inspiration from evocative moments he himself lived through. “I wrote down eighty visual memories from when I was right around my daughter’s age,” Chung states. “They ranged from my parents’ heated arguments in Arkansas, to a man who worked for my father dragging a cross around town, to my grandmother burning down half our farm.” These snapshots each find space in the final work, effortlessly woven into a broader family drama that gives Minari its unyielding heartbeat.

In scene after scene, through argument after argument, characters crash and separate. And despite the film’s nostalgic cinematography of earth tones backlit by dizzying skies, the serrated edges of life are never sanded down in Chung’s unflinching look at the difficulties of uprooting oneself and replanting on foreign soil. However, Chung argues—effectively—that the sweat and tears are worth even a shot at the American dream.

In the end, this age-old hook proves irresistible. Not only did Minari capture the hearts of the Sundance jury, Chung’s culturally specific yet expansive hymn also nabbed Sundance’s Audience Award—a twofer that belies the way Minari appeals both to the senses and the brain. Not only does Minari provide something to industry veterans, audience members like myself left Sundance utterly quenched by the work of Chung and his excellent cast and crew.

Gender: 5/5
Does it pass the Bechdel Test? YES

Organized around patriarch Jacob (Steven Yeun), his wife Monica (Yeri Han), and their young children David (Alan Kim) and elder daughter Anne (Noel Kate Cho), Minari introduces the family on a remote, unworked field in Arkansas. Jacob had moved them there to chase a piece of land he could call his own, but this dream is his, not his family’s. Monica’s heartbreaking homesickness for a social network, which they had back in California, eventually leads to Jacob calling in reinforcements. Monica’s mother Soonja (Yuh-Jung Youn) joins them early in the film, lending both childrearing and emotional support to the young parents.

Although ostensibly driven by Jacob’s quest to wrangle mother nature into cash flow, Minari portrays its small cast with so much depth that even just three female characters manage to encompass a world of women’s perspectives. For example, Monica could have easily devolved into a shallow portrait of an unhappy or nagging wife. But Han, a veteran actor from South Korea with an impressive stack of hardware to call her own, creates empathy for the trepidation that a woman might feel when she is forced to start from scratch with two children in tow and a stubborn husband who seems to care more about his own dream than about responsibilities at home. With Monica’s tenuous grasp of the English language isolating her even further, Han delivers an incredible performance that beseeches its audience to see all sides of a difficult situation.

Monica’s sensitivity is jubilantly contrasted by the devil-may-care nature of her mother Soonja, who can’t cook worth a damn yet plays a brilliant game of Go-Stop. But while Soonja crows her victories over her sour-faced grandson and teases him for having a “broken penis” because of his bed-wetting problem, beneath her taunts lies a woman who loves with all her heart. Monica might baby David in the constant fear that his weak heart may give out, but her mother Soonja would sooner push a fledgling out of its nest so that it may finally learn to fly.

Meanwhile, holding everyone together is Anne, a pre-teen who has been preemptively thrust into responsibilities beyond her years. She must traverse emotionally choppy waters, like when her parents throw wall-rattling fits and Anne copes by teaching her younger brother to fold and toss paper airplanes naively penned with the entreaty, “DON’T FIGHT.” Or when her mother joins her father at work and asserts that the kids don’t need supervision, Anne must shoulder the care of her younger brother. Throughout the film, Anne’s invisible contributions mirror the emotional labor and housework that women all over the world silently bear. But rather than turning Anne into a martyr, Chung humanizes the young woman by allowing her quotidian pleasures and concerns of her own.

Overall, Chung renders traditional female archetypes with such dimensionality that they portray the emotional breadth even a full cast of women might lack when guided by less capable hands.

Race: 5/5

Minari centers a Korean American family and relinquishes not a single inch of ground in building that reality. Rather than preempting non-Korean audiences by dumbing anything down, like having characters speak in English when real-world immigrants would actually be speaking in their native language, Chung brings viewers into the fold through subtitles and cultural references. (A huge laugh getter: Soonja hauling out a comically large bag of dried anchovies brought over from Korea—the homesick Monica clapping her hand over her mouth, tears in her eyes.)

My only double-take during the film involved Yeun’s American accent, which periodically took me out of the moment. On preparing for a predominantly Korean-language role, Yeun says, “Korean is something that I can speak, but not necessarily in the right vernacular for Jacob, so I knew that would take some real study and work.” While his dialogue did sound slightly “off” to me during the viewing, Yeun addresses this exact point in an interview with the New York Times. “At the start, I kept trying to mimic the standard Korean ahjussi accent, and it felt fraudulent. And I’m OK with it, because this was the accent I chose for this character as opposed to servicing this collective understanding of what a Korean accent is traditionally supposed to sound like.”

Regardless of whether or not Yeun’s unique accent distracts from the overall performance, it’s a minor quibble in the face of work that does so much to elevate the experience of this underrepresented community. Better yet, all Korean characters were cast with actors of Korean descent. When even supporting and minor roles like that of Arkansans Mrs. Oh (Esther Moon) and June (Chloe Lee) are played authentically, you know Chung and team took this seriously.

Bonus for Age: +1.00

I’m waiting for the array of essays to come out that deconstruct the prominence of snarky and/or lovable grandmas in East Asian media. Whether it’s The Farewell’s Nai Nai to the cackling Lori Tan Chinn in Comedy Central’s Awkwafina is Nora from Queens, or Tsai Chin’s brooding, badass role in Lucky Grandma (2019), filial piety is alive and well in Asian American content.

Minari happily adds to the trend, delving deeply into the character of Soonja. She receives her own storyline and drives integral plot turns, showcasing how media can embrace older actors without oversimplifying their dreams or regrets. Keep in mind, about 1 in 5 Americans are over the age of 60, but they made up only 11% of characters in top films in 2016. Within that small group, almost three-quarters were men and 77% of roles went to white characters. By giving space to a senior woman of color, Minari facilitates a voice that’s glaringly absent in film.

Mediaversity Grade: A+ 5.33/5

Chung’s latest film has it all: unbridled hope, aching pathos, and all the rollercoaster moments in between. It’s American cinema at its most inclusive, one that reaches out while vigilantly safeguarding its core of human specificity.

Like Minari? Try these other titles that bank on Americana.

Grade: ALiFebruary 10, 2020