[8.6/10] There are two abiding images in Minari. The first is the smoke billowing out of a stack at the hatchery where Jacob and Monica, the parents of a young Korean immigrant family, work. Jacob tells his little son, David, that it’s the male chicks being discarded. When David inquires about what that means and why, Jacob resolutely explains that those male chicks aren’t useful, and this is what the world does to things that aren’t, so they had better keep themselves useful.
It’s a haunting fable for a young father who aspires to be a farmer, moves his family halfway across the country, and struggles to make ends meet. Jacob’s dream is to build something himself, to succeed on his own terms, rather than stare at chicken behinds until he dies. But it’s a hard life, full of backbreaking labor and uncertain prospects for success given the vicissitudes of weather and access to water and other challenges. And it puts a strain on Jacob and Monica’s marriage, particularly when Monica is ready to return to their old life in California rather than brave such hardships with variable, at best, chances for reward.
But it’s also a concerning image for David, a young boy with a heart murmur. Given his condition, his parents discourage him from running or doing much of anything strenuous. His father tells him to use his mind instead, to learn about this world and how to make value with your wits. As the family scrimps and labors, Jacob and Monica working one job during the workday and Jacob slaving away at the farm in his free hours, you can feel them trying to stay ahead of that smoke, to avoid being cast aside or left behind for failing to prove themselves sufficiently useful to this world.
The other abiding image is the titular minari plant. Monica’s mother, referred to as Grandma, brings the seeds from Korea and plants them in a nearby creek with her grandson. She tells David that it can grow anywhere. She reassures him that it’s for rich and poor alike, built to flourish under so many conditions that it’s there for anyone to eat and enjoy.
It feels like a metonym for the Yi family, a Korean family who’ve planted themselves in the wilds of rural Arkansas and find their own way to take root. There is something hearty about the plant, able to grow and sustain itself despite the markedly different conditions from whence it came. For an immigrant family, struggling in places but striving to get by, there is hope in that native plant finding a new home in unfamiliar land and sprouting toward the sky nonetheless.
With those two guiding themes -- the threat of the wafting smoke and the hope of the sprouting herb -- Minari is a heartfelt, hilarious, and ultimately poignant story of this relatable family braving its way through a unique situation. Writer and director Lee Isaac Chung uses that pair of images as his lodestone to guide the film’s story, but more than anything, it plays like a slice of life movie. Just witnessing the vignettes of the Yi family adjusting to life in Arkansas (or not adjusting to it), trying to make farm life work, or acclimate the addition of an elder to the immediate family, is worth the price of admission separate and apart from the movie’s larger aims.
It works as a farm movie. Separate and apart from the compelling immigrant story, folks who grew up reading these types of tales of folks trying to make a recalcitrant farm work will recognize the beats, and they’re done with aplomb here. It works as a transplant story, with the bits of cultural exchange we see both within the family and the community it represents, as well as with the Arkansas community they’ve joined. The glimpses of the places where the two intersect are fascinating, measuring differences and similarities in ways both affecting and amusing.
But boy is there amusement to be had when Grandma shows up. The heart of the movie comes in her relationship with David, and the two make for an adorable and uproariously funny pair. There is a forthrightness to both of them that cannot help but simultaneously endear them to the viewer and tickle your funny bone. Grandma will rattle off lines like “You make this kid so much crap,” or “So I drank a little pee! It was fun!” or David will drink a Korean home remedy and say something frank like, “Grandma, never ever bring this again” and it’s impossible not to be charmed by the homespun and hilarious matter-of-factness that becomes the foundation of their friendship.
The growth of that friendship is the strongest element in an already strong movie. At first, David rejects the grandmother who just arrived from Korea for seeming strange and unfamiliar and “not a real grandma.” But as their time together on the farm progresses, she encourages him, she shares their family’s culture with him, she sees his unassuming strength despite his condition, and in the film’s most heart-warming scene, she wraps him up tight to protect him from death or fate or whatever forces would dare do harm to such a sweet little boy.
And in the end, he returns the favor. After a distraught, stroke-debilitated grandmother wanders off, blaming herself for catastrophe, David and Ann stop her. They try to bring her back home, having accepted her as a vital part of that family, loving her no matter what condition she’s in. Whether it was Grandma’s healing prayer, or the country air, or the simple biological processes of the human body, a check-up for David reveals that his condition is getting better, that he is stronger than anyone but Grandma thought, and he uses that strength to chase after her and bring her home.
Such caring is necessary because she accidentally set the family barn ablaze, replete with the fruits and vegetables Jacob had just made a deal to sell to a shop in Oklahoma City. In one accidental conflagration, months of work, piles of debt, burn up into nothing. It’s telling that Jacob runs in, potentially to be consumed by that same black smoke that would mark him as a failure, as something less than useful to be discarded by this world.
And yet, the wife who was (not unreasonably) ready to move on from all of this, runs in to save him. As the smoke grows denser, they call for one another, fulfilling the promise to save each other. Their future is uncertain, but it points toward hope, toward something binding them together beyond the need for good times and financial security to sustain them.
The closing moments of the film see the Yi family huddled on the floor together in the aftermath, as Jacob wanted the night they moved in. It’s a sign of solidarity and family togetherness. And when Jacob and David go to the “Minari Creek” to find the fruits of what Grandma planted, they find the herb has given them something to hold onto nonetheless. Despite this unusual environment far different from the place where these seeds were formed, they persevere and sustain. So too does the Yi family, despite great hardship, survive and maybe even flourish, with one another’s help.
