The Commercial Appeal - Go Memphis
Brilliant ‘Minari’ a beautifully told family story
“Minari” is an intimate story beautifully told.
Lee Isaac Chung’s brilliant movie, in theaters Friday, makes the familiar new, grabbing you with cuteness by way of the adorable Alan S. Kim and refusing to let you go, even as things grow heavier. By then, you’re invested in the fortunes of a family (it’s based loosely on Chung’s childhood), and there’s no turning back.
Kim plays David, a little boy moving with his family to rural Arkansas. His father Jacob (Steven Yeun) and mother Monica (Yeri Han), along with David’s older sister Anne (Noel Cho), are relocating from California – not their first uprooting. Jacob works in chicken-sexing, identifying males from females. He’s a whiz at it, evidently. Monica, not so much. But she practices and is able to land a job alongside Jacob.
Jacob and Monica are Korean immigrants, chasing the American dream from one state to the next, a journey Jacob has more patience for than Monica. When they arrive in Arkansas, Monica is less than thrilled to find they will be living in a mobile home in the middle of nowhere.
The heart of the movie is a grandmother-grandson relationship
Less than thrilled is her default position for much of the movie. Her disappointment with their situation leads to a lot of arguments. In one simultaneously cute and heartbreaking scene, David and Anne make paper airplanes with “stop fighting” written on them.
Jacob dreams of a farm and begins planting Korean vegetables, thinking that Korean food is taking off in the U.S. so there will be interest. (The film is set in the 1980s). In a small example of how Chung upends expectations, a local man (Will Patton in a wonderfully modulated performance that could have been ripe for parody but is instead sympathetic), deeply religious, doesn’t doubt Jacob’s thinking about what he wants to plant. There is no bigotry in his response. He fought in the Korean War and loved the food there.
David has a heart murmur, and Monica has to remind him repeatedly not to run. He’s a little kid so that’s a tall order. With Monica and Jacob both working, they make the decision to bring Monica’s mother, Soonja (Yuh-jung Youn), over from Korea to help take care of the kids.
That’s when the movie truly begins. Soonja is something, a cursing, cardplaying free spirit, which is not at all what David was expecting. He can’t stand her, complains she “smells like Korea” – says she doesn’t act like a grandmother.
Which, of course, is what the audience loves about her.
‘Minari’ feels familiar, but takes unpredictable turns
If you think that Soonja and David will begrudgingly grow closer, that’s not a surprise. It’s how it happens, Chung’s small, perfectly realized details of the slow transformation that make “Minari” so wonderful. There’s not a false note in it.
Nor does Chung take the traditional path for David and Soonja’s journey – or the family’s. Instead, small victories are tempered by bigger challenges. Nothing comes easily.
None of this works without the performances, which are uniformly outstanding. Yeun captures the frustration of someone who believes his dreams are within reach, but always just beyond his grasp. Han’s role is trickier. We’re not sure she believes in the dream at all. She certainly doesn’t see it coming true in a trailer in rural Arkansas. The fights between Jacob and Monica are realistic, grounded in fear – of losing their home,
their dreams, their family – and all the more uncomfortable for it.
But it’s Youn and Kim whose relationship forms the heart of the film. There’s nothing gooey or melodramatic about it, even when drama intrudes. Sometimes you’ll hear a film like this described as almost like a documentary in its realism.
This isn’t that. Instead, it’s more like finding home movies of a family you didn’t know, but whose story fascinates you as you see it playing out. You want everything to end well, even as you wonder if it can.
“Minari” is as moving as it is entertaining, and it is a lot of both.