In the family drama Minari, the father (Steven Tuen) in a Korean immigrant family moves them all to rural Arkansas to realize his dream of becoming a landed farmer. But, does everyone share the same dream? Is everyone willing to make the tradeoffs necessary to achieve it?
He’s been working in California for ten years at an industrial hatchery as a lowly paid chicken sexer (yep, ya always learn something at the movies). This is the moment when he can finally afford his own 50 acres, and, upon arriving at his own property, he is triumphant. His wife (Yeri Han), taking the measure of the remote setting and the manufactured-home-on-wheels, doesn’t see it that way.
To make things more tolerable, she moves her spirited mom (Yuh-jung Youn) into the household. (Spoiler: don’t let dotty grandma operate the incinerator.) The family faces the challenges of entrepreneurship and the new surroundings.
Although the story is set in the immigrant experience, I don’t see the film as about immigration. It’s more universal than that. Far from bewildered and exploited, the dad here is confident and dismissive of the locals’ superstitions. He believes and acts as if he were the master of his own fate.
Minari is more about whether the family is a team, cohesively committed to the same goal. Just what is redemption supposed to look like here? The story of Minari is autobiographical – drawn from the childhood of its writer-director Lee Isaac Chung. Chung’s film is well-crafted, but not thrilling.
The prolific character actor Will Patton excels in a fine part as a good-hearted Pentecostal Arkansan, who is determined to build a friendship with the farmer dad.
Alan S. Kim is especially good as the youngest child, the surrogate for director Chung at age seven. Yuh-jung Youn is also stellar as the grandma.
Yuen is a superb actor with an uncanny gift for showing up in really good movies: I Origins, Okja, Sorry to Bother You, Burning. Here, he’s good in a less challenging role than he’s used to.
I saw Minari at an A24 screening accessible to SFFILM members. It releases more widely on VOD this weekend.