A HOME IN THE HEARTLAND
Director Lee Isaac Chung draws on his own experiences as a KoreanAmerican child growing up in rural Arkansas in the 1980s to create a small but defiantly touching tribute to the resilience and hard work that’s needed to succeed in a world where there’s so much stacked against you.
Told predominantly through the eyes of Chung’s fictional surrogate — seven-year-old David (Alan S Kim) — it’s a coming-of-age tale that’s familiar and universal but still unique in its own quiet way.
David’s father Jacob (Steven Yeung) has brought his family from the sun-drenched climes of California to the dusty, Biblethumping fields of Arkansas where he believes that the larger amount of land he’s purchased for a reasonable price will be a new “garden of Eden”, whose rich soil will produce the Korean vegetables he hopes to sell to Korean-American communities across the US. David’s mother Monica (Yeri Han) is sceptical and her patience is evaporating, much like the precious water Jacob needs for his crops. During the week Monica and Jacob work at a nearby chicken farm, where their chicken sexing skills provide the only source of a meagre income.
This money can’t sustain Jacob’s sidehustle dreams without the potentially devastating financial assistance from the local bank. When Monica’s mother Soonja (Yuh-Jung Youn) arrives to help look after David and his prim sister Anne (Noel Cho), the free-spirited grandmother with her own ideas about how to navigate the typical immigrant conflict between here and there, and old and new, has a difficult but eventually cohering effect on the delicate balance of the straining family. Chung’s skill here is to bypass the expected beats of the immigrant narrative — racism, lack of acceptance, assimilation — by offering a portrait of people who, at their core, are just another group of idealistic, hard-working strivers looking to make their lives more bearable. There are scenes in which racism is briefly alluded to but the real obstacles to Jacob’s ability to achieve his dreams don’t come from outside forces but from within his own character. He’s stubborn, proud and sometimes too committed to his vision to stop and see what his obsession is doing to those he loves.
The landscape here is neither harsh, untamable desert nor the fecund, insectinfested jungle, but a very ordinary agricultural environment that offers the difficult challenges of basic things like access to water and money for cultivation.
The intangible possibilities of what the landscape could offer are conveyed through cinematographer Lachlan Milne’s languishing lens that evokes these feelings simply but majestically, giving the film the air of wonder and mystery needed to remind us that this story is told through David’s young eyes. Emile Mosseri’s music also works excellently to a similar end — often threatening to soar off into the predictable clouds of melodrama before quietly backing off and grounding the emotional tone firmly back to earth.
Chung injects the story with a few moments of carefully chosen, underplayed sentimentalism that don’t overwhelm the realism of the story. He’s aided by an excellent cast, who each bring something distinctive to their portrayals of their characters.
Yeun earned a deserved Oscar nomination for his nuanced performance of Jacob, and Yuh-Jung won the best supporting actress Oscar for her layered turn as Soonja — the simultaneously naïve embracer of many of the comforts of American life but also wise, knowledgeable preserver of Korean traditions that help to root the family’s experience and offer them tools to navigate the difficulties of the new world.
Though there are two elements of the plot that are too conveniently resolved in the last act of the film, it’s saved from being overwhelmed by feel-good fuzziness by the ambiguous ending that leaves you hoping for the best but uncertain of the future. That’s a sentiment that, like this story and its characters, is easy for most of us to relate to at the best of times, but particularly at this one.