Every once in a while, a very special film comes around that expands the range of your sympathies and makes you feel a greater sense of oneness with your fellow man without in any way being emotionally manipulative or maudlin. In what has otherwise been a very weak year for movies, we have been blessed with three such films: Sound of Metal, Nomadland, and now, Minari.
Minari, nominated for six Oscars, including best picture (the winners will be announced between the writing and the publishing of this piece), tells the story of Jacob (Steven Yeun) and Monica Yi (Yeri Han), a hard-pressed Korean couple who come to America in the 1980s in the hopes of escaping poverty and achieving their own version of the American dream. Jacob and Monica have a daughter, Anne (Noel Cho), and a young son, David (Alan Kim), who has a taste for Mountain Dew and a heart condition that adds to the family’s worries.
In somewhat of a reverse Grapes of Wrath movement, the Yis travel from California to Arkansas, hoping that they will fare better in the Ozarks than they did in the Golden State. Whereas John Steinbeck’s Okies were forced to leave their farms in the Great Depression, the Yis take up life on a farm, or, as Jacob likes to refer to it, his “big garden.” They’re drawn by the prospect of self-sufficiency, along with the idea of growing Korean foods for the rapidly expanding Korean American population.
“It sounded like a good idea at the time,” we imagine Jacob saying to himself in the early days of his life as a farmer. At first, nothing he does with his plot of land seems to yield fruit, figuratively or literally. As the family struggles with its farm, its financial worries begin to pile up, straining Jacob and Monica’s marriage and forcing them to consider giving up and going back to California.
Fortunately, two providential interventions come to their rescue. The first is the arrival of an oddball stranger, Paul (Will Patton), a Korean War veteran who, when he’s not speaking in tongues and lugging gigantic wooden crosses across the plains on Sundays, helps Jacob irrigate the farm. Then, there’s the appearance of Soonja (Yuh-Jung Youn), Monica’s mother. Soonja is a mischievous, foulmouthed, and irreverent grandparent in the mold of Alan Arkin’s immortal character in Little Miss Sunshine (2006). Like Glenn Close’s Mamaw in Hillbilly Elegy, Soonja is an unlikely savior who manages to lend Minari a strange but effective mix of humor and tenderness, preventing the Yis from tottering over the edge into the abyss. And Soonja’s and David’s initially prickly relationship, like that of Mamaw and J.D. in Hillbilly Elegy, is the emotional heart of the film.
Writer and director Lee Isaac Chung, nominated for Oscars in both categories, modulates expertly between comedy and gravity, diversion and drudgery (there’s plenty of the latter in his depiction of farm life). In fact, the film is semi-autobiographical, a fictionalized account of his own family’s journey from South Korea to Atlanta and then to a small farm in Arkansas. The understated beauty of the story, combined with the sensorial beauty of Emile Mosseri’s Oscar-nominated score and cinematographer Lachlan Milne’s exquisite photography, give Minari the feel of a Terrence Malick film. I thought Chung faltered only toward the end, which seemed overly dramatic in comparison with the appreciably measured tone of the film up to that point. But if the scenes that take place at the climax are also based on his own experiences, it’s hard to quarrel with their inclusion.
The Yis are farmers in the heartland. What could be more American than that? But when they attend church for the first time in Arkansas, their appearance makes them stand out like kiwis in a bowl of oranges. In the social hall following services, when Anne tries to make friends with another young girl in the crowd, the girl starts spouting nonsense words and tells her to “stop me when I say something in your language.” And while taking a sip of water in the water fountain, a blond-haired boy looks at David and says, “Why is your face so flat?”
The first time I saw Minari, I was a little put off by these episodes. I thought that Chung was overstating the extent of racial and ethnic bias in the United States. “Children aren’t really this prejudiced,” I thought while watching the film for the first time. “When I was growing up, I never encountered a Christian kid who said something to me like, ‘Do you people wear those beanies on your heads to hide your horns?’” But after the massage parlor shootings in Atlanta in March and the string of high-profile attacks against Asian Americans that have followed, I was able to see these scenes, and the film overall, in a new light. Jews and other historically persecuted peoples can no more view others’ experience in this country through the prism of their own experience than can white people view the experiences of nonwhite people through the prism of their own histories. Each group’s experience in America is unique and must be understood as such. One of the most important aspects of this understanding is sympathy, which Minari helps us to strive toward. In this regard, though Minari is not, in my opinion, the best film of the year, it may well be the most important.
Daniel Ross Goodman is a writer, rabbi, and scholar from western Massachusetts. He is the author of Somewhere Over the Rainbow: Wonder and Religion in American Cinema and the novel A Single Life.
