Film Review: Minari

Minari is the new film from writer/director, Lee Isaac Chung, serving as a semi-autobiographical reflection on his youth. In the film we follow a Korean-American family who have moved to a small town in rural Arkansas during the 1980s where Jacob Yi (Steven Yeun) intends on setting up a farm of Korean vegetables on their property as a way to support his family, which consists of his wife Monica (Han Ye-ri), daughter Anne (Noel Cho), son David (Alan Kim), and Monica’s mother Soonja (Youn Yuh-jung), who comes a little later into the picture.

Things of course don’t come easy for the family. It’s clear that they’ve been grinding for years in California where Monica seems more comfortable. She wasn’t satisfied when she first lays her eyes on the mobile home that Jacob has purchased. The friction between them often leads to fights, which the film doesn’t dwell on too much. In fact, the one moment has the kids begin writing “don’t fight” on paper, and forming paper planes that they throw at their parents, not that it really ends up making much of a difference. Things become slightly more chill when Soonja is brought in straight from South Korea, keeping an eye on the kids while the farm is managed.

Minari is superficially speaking not all that different from a lot of stories we see about immigrants. It deals in assimilation, the relentless, almost futile, pursuit of the American dream, the struggles faced by people of color in a mostly white locale, and the generational divide that occurs between immigrants and their children, who become more quickly absorb American culture and distancing themselves from their heritage. Minari is all these things, but Lee Isaac Chung has such a strong grasp of creating a certain atmosphere and mood with his filmmaking, which is absolutely top notch.

The experience of watching Minari is like a nostalgic longing for an old memory, one that carries all the humor, hope, and heartbreak that comes with the family’s day-to-day experiences, not over-sentimentalized, but also not afraid to embrace all the varied emotions that our characters feel at any given moment. The work put in by cinematographer Lachlan Milne and composer Emile Mosseri (who made one of the best scores I ever heard last year with The Last Black Man In San Francisco, and he doesn’t disappoint here) add so much in capturing the mundanity of life with a sense of wonder and etherealness that completely swept me away from the opening frame to the very last.

The cast is uniformly excellent. Steven Yeun and Han Ye-ri have a strong dynamic together that feels grounded. Yeun’s Korean accent when speaking English occasionally slips, but not enough to distract. Youn Yuh-jung is an instantly lovable delight, bursting with so much personality. And the performances from the younger cast members, Noel Cho and Alan Kim, are great as well, working off their much more experienced co-stars with ease, especially Kim, who has more to do since most of the film is through his eyes. Someone I was very surprised by and didn’t even recognize for a sizable chunk of the film was Will Patton, who plays Paul, a thoroughly bizarre evangelical that Jacob hires to help out at the farm.

Minari is a film I loved quite a bit. It’s a vividly drawn look at a family that makes the small feel so big. I saw so much of my own experiences as well as the experiences of people I’ve known here throughout the film, mostly in the minute stuff, David not liking the fact that he has to share his bedroom with a relative, watching a father figure stubbornly drag his family to places for the off-chance he might find success that will provide for them, meeting white kids who in one breath say the most insensitive things then being friendly in the next, hell, even David’s habit of drinking too much Mountain Dew. I don’t know where and how much Lee Isaac Chung may have embellished of his true-to-life details for dramatic effect, not that it really matters, but at no point does it come across as overblown. It creates the feeling of being there with the characters, sharing in these moments with them. Sometimes the film will rely too heavy on its atmosphere, lessening some of the dramatic impact of the plot beats, and many scenes in the middle could be called disconnected by more unforgiving eyes, but that ultimately didn’t bother me in the grand scheme of things. I believe this film is truly something special. I was charmed by its characters, enamored by its filmmaking, and touched by its empathy. Few films in 2020 have warmed my heart as much as this has, and it’s one I sincerely hope none of you miss out on.

Minari is currently out in select virtual cinemas based in New York and Los Angeles. It will be given a wide release on February 12th, 2021.