A Korean American dream
THE BIG RELEASE MINARI 12 ★★★★★
SUBTLE and unassuming, Minari is a family drama so exquisitely understated that were it not for its six Bafta and six Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, you’d be likely to overlook it. Don’t – this is one of the year’s most lovely movies.
A timeless and universal tale seemingly set in 1980s America, it sees a young South Korean immigrant family called Yi up sticks from California to rural Arkansas. Here the dad, Jacob (Oscar-nominated Steven Yeun), has gambled all their savings on a leaky, im-mobile home (it’s propped up on breeze blocks) in the centre of a remote empty field, where he aims to make their fortune growing Korean produce. His wife Monica (Han Ye-ri) is not impressed. Especially given their seven-year-old son David (Alan S Kim) has a weak heart that could require instant hospitalisation. The couple are constantly fighting and the arrival of Monica’s eccentric mother (Oscarnominated Youn Yuh-jung, known as the Korean Meryl Streep) throws a further wild card into the mix.
Eyebrows were raised when Minari won the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film (a category it’s also likely to win at the Academy Awards).
Because though a lot of the dialogue is in Korean, Minari was written in English and shot in America by an American-born film-maker (the Oscar-nominated Lee Isaac Chung), on whose US boyhood this quintessential American Dream story was based.
Challenging that ‘foreign’ categorisation seems appropriate. This is a film not about racism but about displacement, about the immigrant experience and where our true home is, about what roots us and what we need to flourish when transplanted to new soil. It’s also a profound tribute to the ties of family and of appreciating the simple, fundamental truths of life – so the ideal film as we emerge, blinking, from lockdown. The intention is still to roll out Minari on big screens, starting with drive-ins, where it may well prove a surprise hit. After all, there are only so many times you want to pay top-dollar to rewatch The Greatest Showman through your windscreen.
Available Friday on demand and in virtual cinemas; from April 12 in drive-in cinemas; in cinemas as they reopen
THE VERDICT
A multi-Oscar-nominated must-see. An instant, if modest, classic