SUNDANCE REVIEW: Minari
Minari
United States Dramatic Competition
Written/Directed by Lee Isaac Chung
David, being seven years old, knows his mind. Mountain Dew is his favorite, houses on wheels like big cars are cool, and real grandmas bake cookies and don’t swear. He’d like to run and play, but he heeds his mother’s warning that his weak heart may not be able to handle it and he definitely does not want to see heaven. Not yet, anyway. Seven years old is a milestone in childhood development when children start asserting their personalities and using their rudimentary logic to start building the principals that will be the lens through which they view the world into adulthood. At seven years a person starts the codification of a private, individual system of beliefs. If you think about it, your core beliefs on fairness, compassion, morality and identity were defined by a second grader.
What makes matters worse is that seven-year-olds are looking to adults for examples of ideologies, but they’re all acting on the ethos they created when they were dumb kids and the cycle continues. Minari is the story of David, a Korean American boy, who moves with his family to rural Arkansas so his father, Jacob (Steven Yeun), can follow his American dream of being a farmer. Jacob feels like he did his time sexing chicks at a hatchery in San Francisco for a decade, and is now entitled to do and spend whatever it takes to make his ambition of farming Korean vegetables in America a reality. Even if that means sacrifices from the family. This is a point of contention with David’s mother, Monica (Han Yeri), who believes that you shouldn’t take a leap of faith without all of the financial, medical and spiritual safety nets in place. David and his sister warily watch their parents argue from behind the doorjamb and discuss privately whom they’d rather live with, mom or dad. David gets a crucial third perspective when his grandmother arrives from Korea and threatens the already tenuous back and forth by not taking sides with mom or dad. She generally takes the side of David in the interest of maintaining the preciousness and whimsy of his childhood, which, of course, makes him very suspicious.
Having David as our entry point to this family is what makes Minari both brilliant and beautiful. The three adults are thwarted by their immutability. Their minds have been made up in such a way that they can never truly see eye to eye, so the crux of the narrative comes down to how these experiences are going to change David and who is he going to be for the rest of his life. The performances are poignant and impeccable. The tensions between Jacob and Monica, Yeun and Yeri, are as palpable in the quiet and civil times as they are in the arguments. Their unease of posture and body language is captured in the frame, which highlights their physical and emotional distance. Yuh Jung Yoon is irresistibly charming as the grandmother and her vivacious energy and intentional childishness is typified by the way she loves to sit on the floor in front of the TV with her entire being filling foreground as David glances, out of focus, over her shoulder. Alan S. Kim’s performance as David felt as real as any seven year old - not entirely innocent or wise, but always discerning. With Lee Isaac Chung training the audience to David’s viewpoint, rural Arkansas can feel at times lush and promising but also alien and unrelenting. The juxtaposition of the wideness of the land and the tightness of the trailer-home is used as atmosphere and metaphor as each member of the family can feel so alone on top of each other.
Hidden in the title, Minari, is the message that a good life does not unnecessarily have to come from a calculated and concerted effort. It can also come from finding a place of joy and then watching what flourishes. Minari takes place in the 1980s and shares some autobiographical elements of writer/director Lee Isaac Chung, which would make him maybe a few years older than myself, and it is such a privilege to see this childhood that is chronologically parallel but mostly dissimilar to my own. Its universal lessons about family, love, and empathy may not change anyone’s essential, eternally seven-year old selves, but may help to understand each other’s a little better.
