Movies – Minari

“Minari.” credit: Josh Ethan Johnson/A24

Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari (USA, 2021) is such a well-conceived, well-written, well-shot and well-performed story that I feel a little guilty saying it falls short of being genuinely satisfying. But most movie viewers and critics are rightfully singing its praises, and I have little argument with that.

Jacob and Monica Yi (Steven Yeun and Yeri Han, both excellent) came to the U.S. from South Korea and settled in California, making their living working in chicken hatcheries dividing male chicks (don’t taste great grown-up, don’t lay eggs) from more desirable female chicks. They also started a family, daughter Anne (Noel Cho) and her younger brother David (Alan S. Kim). They’ve saved quite a bit of money, so Jacob feels compelled to follow his next great ambition; starting a farm to grow Korean vegetables for the American, and expat Korean, markets.

As the film opens, their rental truck and the family station wagon are pulling into a green and open piece of Alabama farmland, upon which is perched a fair-sized mobile home. Jacob feels like he just woke up on Christmas morning, but Monica wasn’t planning on a trailer-park-without-the-park that’s twenty miles away from a lot of basic necessities. Young David has an abnormal heart murmur, and would ideally be closer to a hospital. There’s a nearby hatchery they’ll both work at while the farm is coming up to speed, and a few fellow Koreans work there. But otherwise, they’re on their own with few socializing options.

Jacob’s newly-purchased used tractor is delivered by Paul (veteran character ace Will Patton); he’s a twitchy born-again local eccentric, friendly and gracious, who isn’t afraid of some hard work, and he and Jacob work together to start laying down crop. Monica’s having big, understandable adjustment issues, though, and after a high-volume “discussion,” she and Jacob decide they’ll bring Monica’s mother, Grandma Soonja (Youn Yuh-jung) out from Korea to live with them. Bearing Korean chili powder, anchovies and humbling infusions of cash for the grown-ups, Grandma and David engage in hilarious adversarial negotiations and pranks – she teaches him to play cards and hurl profanities, and he turns her on to professional wrestling on TV.

Jacob’s game to meet the challenges of his version of the American dream. and writer/director Chung is keen to convince us that their original nationality makes no difference whatsoever. I’m not convinced that’s how things uneventfully went in that regard, but I won’t second-guess Chung’s discretion here – his film is about other things, and his streamlined and efficient narrative has its own admirability. Besides a bit of predictably wrong-headed “ching-chong ping-pong” from a kid or two at the local church, the Yi’s are welcomed, and start to settle in to their new life. Unpredictably, though, Korean produce purveyors in Dallas renege on their contracts with Jacob, and he must scramble to make quick cold-sales while his already-harvested goods sit in storage.

Youn Yuh-jung in “Minari.” credit: A24

Lee Isaac Chung wrote the film as well as directing it, and it’s a minor masterpiece of understatement, clarity and honest credibility. Predominantly autobiographical (David is his younger alter-ego), he’s content to trust the story to tell itself, and gives his actors as much freedom, or, crucially, as much control over his characters as they see fit to express.

As a short story that he’s chosen to film, it’s moving and surprisingly powerful, and this is the primary, legitimate reason to see it. But Chung is far better at writing and directing actors than he is in crafting a genuinely cinematic experience. I found Minari to be a terrific made-for-TV-scaled movie; apart from a few Malick-like ‘golden-time’ landscape shots too few and far-between to leave much of an impression, there isn’t a lot here visually besides the ordered presentation of narrative and location. Cinematographer Lachlan Milne has professionally delivered all (I suspect) that Chung asked for, but I imagine Milne himself absorbed a lot of missed visual opportunities, and carried on nonetheless.

But I don’t want to grouse too much. Chung’s film displays an extraordinary amount of intelligence, empathy, good humor and gracious humanity without softening the rigors of starting over in a new place with some new ideas and putting a lot of familiar things at risk. Chung has seized on an insistent Steinbeck-ian tone here, and it pays off. I still have Bryan Stevenson’s Alabama in the back of my own brain, but Chung gives us a nice break from that. Not to mention that he filmed it in Oklahoma.