Film review

  • Minari

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Lee Isaac Chung (2020)

    Minari opened this year’s (online) Glasgow Film Festival, where it received its British premiere.  In a conversation with Festival co-director Allan Hunter, Lee Isaac Chung talked engagingly about the process of fusing memories of his childhood with largely fictionalised characters to represent himself, his sister, parents and maternal grandmother on screen.  Chung was born in 1978 in Denver, Colorado; his family moved to a small farm outside Lincoln, Arkansas when he was still a young child.  Set in Reagan-era America, Minari begins with the arrival in rural Arkansas of Jacob Yi (Steven Yeun), his wife Monica (Han Ye-ri) and their two children, Anne (Noel Kate Cho) and David (Alan Kim), who is Chung’s alter ego.

    Jacob and Monica emigrated from South Korea to America for a materially better life.  Both children were born in their parents’ new country.  The Yis have been living in California, where Jacob had a job as a poultry industry worker.  Fired by the American Dream and determined to be seen as a success by his wife and kids, he buys a home and a plot of land in Arkansas, where he means to grow Korean fruit and vegetables to sell to immigrant communities in Dallas.  (We learn there are 30,000 Korean immigrants to America each year, most based in major cities.)   How did Jacob afford the purchase?  The family dwelling is a trailer and it transpires the previous owner of the land was unable to cultivate it and went broke.  Until he can build up a viable business, Jacob will do the same work in Arkansas that he did in California.  The manager of a local hatchery introduces him to his new colleagues as an expert chicken sexer.  Monica also gets a job at the hatchery, working alongside her husband, though she can’t match his speed in sorting the chicks.  (The males, unable to lay eggs and unsuitable for chicken meat production, are disposed of immediately.)  At home, tensions between Jacob and Monica rapidly increase.  She bitterly regrets their move to a more isolated way of life, especially in view of young David’s heart condition.  It’s agreed that Monica’s elderly mother will travel from South Korea to move in with the family and help with childcare.

    Minari is distinguished throughout by sensitive acting that is soon in evidence:  in Monica’s stricken distress as she first sees the home on wheels; when Jacob, upbeat in the company of his wife and children, sits alone, his face admitting what he’s got them into. These private looks, expressing feelings that go unseen by the other people on the screen, bring the viewer closer to the characters.  Steven Yeun, the suavely sinister Ben in Lee Chang-dong’s Burning (2018), is very different here:  his portrait of Jacob has remarkable emotional depth.  Han Ye-ri’s Monica is an affecting combination of anxiety and resilience; Noel Kate Cho’s precociously solicitous Anne is credibly the daughter of her conscientious mother.  Both keep a worried eye on David, reminding him not to exert himself running, which the wide-open spaces beyond the portacabin naturally tempt him to do.  Lee Isaac Chung gets a lovely, witty performance from eight-year-old Alan Kim and, through him, subtly keeps us aware that the story is an evocation of the writer-director’s own past.  I’m not sure how this is achieved but it is:  David, while strongly involved in what’s happening, also seems to experience it as something to be remembered.

    The film’s closing dedication is ‘to grandmothers everywhere’ and there’s no doubt that the unhurried, observant narrative receives an injection of energy the moment Monica’s mother Soon-ja (Youn Yuh-jung) arrives on the scene.  Soon-ja has never previously seen her younger grandchild, who isn’t keen on meeting, let alone sharing a bed with her.  David complains to Monica that the old woman has a ‘smell of Korea’ – not that he’s been there.  A bit later, he tells Soon-ja that and why she’s not a proper grandmother.  In a negative review of Minari, the New Yorker‘s Richard Brody, while acknowledging the ’charm and nuance’ of Youn Yuh-jung’s playing, sees Soon-ja as ‘drawn from a deck of clichés not unlike those of Glenn Close’s character in Hillbilly Elegy’.  The review is replete with vexing Brodyisms (‘between the scenes, neither the characters nor the story seem to exist’:  how is there time, in split-second interstices between sequences, to register this nullity?)  Brody’s comment about the clichéd grandmother, though, deserves attention because he’s both wrong and right.

    Youn Yuh-jung’s earthy vividness is so far removed from Glenn Close’s showcased acting as ‘Mamaw’ in Hillbilly Elegy that their characters aren’t obviously comparable.  When she’s accused of not being grandmotherly the Soon-ja is sitting on the floor wearing a T-shirt and a pair of white undershorts, watching wrestling on television.  David informs her that grandmothers ‘bake cookies – they don’t swear and wear men’s underwear’.  The addiction to wrestling and the choice of pants are convincingly individual details quite lacking in Mamaw but it’s true that Soon-ja, with her salty language and occasionally outrageous behaviour (instead of putting money in a church collection passing along the pew, she removes a note), is the latest in a long cinematic line of elderly reprobates.  David’s censure also raises the question of how this little boy has such preconceived ideas of what a grandmother should be.  He’s making a point that’s important to the story but it’s improbable he would articulate it in the way that he does.  This awkwardness touches on a larger feature of the screenplay.

    Although Chung’s film is inspired by personal experience, some of his plotting has a more secondhand quality.  Talking with Allan Hunter, Chung explained that he meant to nod to Willa Cather’s novels My Antonia and O Pioneers! (the removals van that Jacob drives to the Yis’ new home bears the name ‘Cather Truck Rental’) but Minari also evokes screen stories about the struggles of newcomers to agriculture.  Jacob’s problems with land irrigation bring to mind Jean de Florette; the climactic fire that destroys his crops recalls Out of Africa.   These things aren’t intrinsically improbable, of course; the associations they had for this viewer no doubt say more about my film-watching history than Chung’s.  But I’m still inclined to think he relies on rural-drama conventions to give his film dramatic shape and highlights – and on Soon-ja to do the same.

    Minari is an East Asian plant (something like watercress).  Soon-ja brings seeds of the plant with her from Korea and takes David to a creek to plant them.  The place seems doubly dangerous:  it’s further from the family home than David is supposed to go and there are poisonous snakes in the water.  Fears for the boy’s safety are soon eclipsed, though, by his grandmother’s words of praise for minari.  She explains that the plant, as well as being a versatile cookery ingredient, is hardy; it will grow and thrive in what seem unpropitious conditions.  She thus announces minari’s metaphorical importance.  In the film’s final scene, David returns to the creek with his father. The minari has grown abundantly, enough to be harvested.  ‘Grandma picked a good spot’, Jacob acknowledges.  Despite successive setbacks and the near collapse of his marriage,  he’s now newly committed to cultivating the inhospitable Arkansan soil.

    A couple of things in the set-up aren’t made as clear as they need to be.  I didn’t understand how Anne and David were being schooled (Monica early on wants to move to an urban area with ‘a good school’ but says nothing more on the subject) or whether Paul, the sixty-something man who helps Jacob on the land, gets paid for doing so.  Mention of Paul, though, is a reminder that Chung’s characters are so interesting in themselves that the defects of his script don’t matter as much as they might.  When glint-eyed Paul first appears, introducing himself to Jacob as a Korean War veteran, you may peg him as an unstable, potentially troublesome redneck.  He is representative of local culture and highly eccentric – a Pentecostal Christian given to speaking in tongues, walking the area on Sundays with a sizeable cross on his back and, at one point, exorcising the Yis’ mobile home.  Yet Paul (excellently played by Will Patton) is thoroughly benign.

    Although the Yis attend church (and Monica is into prayer), they seem uncomfortable with the (Baptist?) preacher’s evangelical exuberance and Jacob takes pride in being more rational than the Arkansas natives.  Early on, he declines the services of a water diviner (Ben Hall), stressing to David the importance of using your brains to make decisions.  By the closing stages, as he makes a new start after the barn fire that destroyed his crops but reconciled him and Monica, Jacob’s attitude has changed.  The same water diviner identifies a spot for a well; husband and wife mark the place with a stone that’s a signal of intent to stay on the land.  Chung’s scenario entails that David, too, has second thoughts.  He warms to his grandmother, who teaches him card games that he enjoys, patches him up after he cuts himself badly, and comforts David at night when he has bad dreams or is assailed by fears about his health.  Soon-ja also allows him more physical activity than Monica thinks is good for her son.  As a result, David has a dual change of heart.  In Oklahoma City, a doctor tells the family that the boy’s cardiac condition is much and spontaneously improved.

    The way I’ve described these developments might make it seem the film has quasi-supernatural leanings but that would be to misrepresent it.  The favourable light in which he shows Paul and Jacob’s readiness to accept dowsing are, rather, illustrations of Chung’s generosity towards all his characters and their cultural variety.  It’s also a strength of Minari that Chung gives key events more than one meaning.  The family’s visit to the heart specialist is combined with Jacob’s striking a deal with a Korean grocer in Oklahoma City; Monica is angered that her husband is more concerned with selling vegetables than with his son’s health.  Delivering the good news, the specialist tells the boy’s parents they’re obviously doing well by David – ‘Don’t change a thing’ – just as Monica is on the point of parting company with Jacob.   Their marital tensions are consistently convincing thanks to two fine actors and the mixture of strengths and flaws that Chung has given their characters.  Jacob’s problems with the terrain and its lack of water inform a beautiful sequence in which Monica washes her husband’s hair.  He has strained his shoulder working on the land and can’t lift his arm properly.  Monica massages his scalp and rinses his hair clean.  Jacob seems to receive the water as a gift.

    The dialogue is Korean and English but more of the former than the latter.  This has qualified Minari as a foreign language film for most prize-giving outfits in the current awards season though not, apparently, the Oscars – presumably because the Academy’s rebranded Best International Film category renders what’s technically an American movie ineligible for consideration in that category.  One of the leading contenders in it is the hugely overrated Another Round.  Thomas Vinterberg’s drama has very little in common with Lee Isaac Chung’s except for enuresis.  In Another Round the father of an habitually bed-wetting child gets paralytic enough to follow suit.  David in Minari also tends to pee in his sleep.  One morning he wakes to find a damp patch in the bed he shares with his grandmother, checks his shorts and realises it’s not him.  During the night, Soon-ja has had a serious stroke.  David’s mixture of feelings – relief that he’s not to blame, curious awareness that something has happened to his bedfellow though he’s not sure what – epitomises the emotional richness of Chung’s film (and why it’s so much better than Another Round).  Minari, which uses a cast of South Korean, Korean-American and white American actors, and explores the interaction of different continental cultures, is an authentically international piece of cinema.

    27 February 2021

  • The White Tiger

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Ramin Bahrani (2021)

    It’s not unusual for a screen adaptation of a novel written in the first person to rely on voiceover narrative as a way into the story.  Ramin Bahrani’s screenplay for The White Tiger, adapted from Aravind Adiga’s Booker Prize-winning novel of the same name, does this to an excessive degree.  The result is, for over an hour, barely a film at all.  The images and events we’re watching are virtually redundant confirmation of what the voice on the soundtrack is telling us.  Although the later stages of The White Tiger aren’t quite so dependent on the off-screen storyteller, this narrative adjustment comes over less as a development than as discordance.  Bahrani, whose previous feature was 99 Homes (2014), never finds a coherent authorial voice of his own.

    The film’s opening sequence takes place inside a speeding car.  Bahrani cuts away just as the backseat passenger sees a figure loom up in the vehicle’s path and yells to the driver.  The sequence is repeated about halfway through The White Tiger.  By now, we know the alarmed passenger is the protagonist, Balram Halwai (Adarsh Gourav).  The intervening hour has charted his progress from rural poverty to a job as chauffeur to a rich young couple in Delhi.  They are the suave Ashok (Rajkummar Rao) – son of ‘the Stork’ (Mahesh Manjrekar), the cruelly exploitative landlord of the village of Laxmangarh where Balram grew up – and his even more westernised wife, Pinky (Priyanka Chopra Jonas).  On her birthday, the couple go out to celebrate and get drunk.  Pinky insists on taking the wheel of their car.  The pedestrian who suddenly appears is a child, whom she knocks down and kills.  Balram is always keen to make a good impression with his bosses but even he is taken aback when they instruct him to sign a statement confirming that he was driving.  His obedient signing of the confession is the culmination of the master-servant relationship to which he has been firmly committed but also a turning point. Balram realises he’s regarded by his employers as thoroughly disposable.

    So the worm turns but gradually – it takes ages for Balram to become the master that the storyline dictates he shall be.  In the event, no one is charged in relation to the road accident.  Pinky returns to New York, where she and Ashok first met.  Her shocked, abandoned husband has an emotional collapse through which Balram helps him – at the same time starting to cheat Ashok by fiddling expenses, using his car as a public taxi, and so on.  Once Ashok has (suddenly) recovered, he sets to work, on behalf of his father, bribing politicians so that the Stork clan avoids paying taxes.  Balram’s young nephew Dharam (Vedant Sinha) is sent by his family to live with his uncle and learn how to become a driver.  Balram eventually has a light bulb moment, murders Ashok and makes off with his boss’s bagful of money for bribes, fleeing Delhi and evading capture.  In Bangalore he bribes the local police to outlaw other, unlicensed taxi services, and invests the rest of the stolen cash in his own taxi business, whose monopoly brings Balram great financial success.  He treats his drivers as employees rather than servants, sponsors Dharam’s education and is sanguine about their relatives back in Laxmangarh being killed by the Stork’s men in revenge for Ashok’s death.  Balram also changes his name to Ashok Sharma.

    Balram’s voice in the film is supposedly reading the text of an email that he’s sending to the Chinese premier Wen Jiabao, who is visiting India and whom Balram would like to meet (but doesn’t).  I don’t know Aravind Adiga’s original but the film left me wondering if the novel presents Balram as a potentially unreliable narrator:  it’s not hard to imagine that readers might be kept guessing whether this teller of his own story really is a successful entrepreneur or a fantasist.  It would obviously be possible for a film-maker to play the audience in a similar way but Ramin Bahrani chooses not to.  He occasionally shows Balram in the act of composing his email, from which it’s clear at least that he looks the entrepreneurial part, with his man bun and laptop.  There’s no reason to think things didn’t actually happen as he describes them and as Bahrani, in the numerous flashbacks, shows them.  There is reason to become impatient with how long it takes for the penny to drop with Balram that he’s being exploited and for him to fight back.

    The impatience results partly from knowing, from an early stage of Balram’s life story, that he’s unusually bright.  As a young adolescent (Harshit Mahawar), he’s offered a scholarship to a school in Delhi and told that he’s a ‘white tiger’ – a creature unique in each generation.  He can’t take up the scholarship:  with his ailing father (Satish Kumar) unable to pay the Stork, Balram is sent by his grandmother (Kamlesh Gill) to work at the village tea stall, and he gives up school altogether.  Once that’s happened, his exceptionality, along with his awareness of it, is put on ice until the time finally arrives for him to fulfil his destiny.  It’s a visit with Dharam to the Delhi zoo and the sight there of a white tiger that reminds Balram who he is. The narrative structure, as well as depriving the film of pace and suspense, also works to the disadvantage of Adarsh Gourav, the talented young actor who plays Balram.  From the early scenes in Laxmangarh, Gourav exudes a dynamic, sensitive intelligence.  He always compels attention and interest but it’s frustrating he has to spend much of the film doing unquestioning acceptance of the status quo.

    Aravind Adiga uses the caste system and Hindu-Muslim enmities to give a specifically Indian take on his making-of-a-ruthless-capitalist theme.  Ramin Bahrani’s illustrations of the baleful consequences of these cultural traditions and of vast economic inequity are sometimes vivid.  There’s no denying that these and, especially, the lethally calculating climax to The White Tiger offer some kind of corrective to the upbeat falsity of Danny’s Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire.  You wonder, though, how much the impact of Adiga’s book was down to India’s relatively recent recognition as a powerhouse in the globalised economy.   The White Tiger was published in 2008 (the same year, incidentally, that Slumdog Millionaire was released) – just a few years after the term ‘BRIC economies’ was coined.  The events in the film too are taking place in the early years of the century; a decade or so later, India’s economic progress looks more irresistible than ever.  But this also means the phenomenon which Ashok Sharma, né Balram Halwai, represents is no longer any kind of dramatic surprise.  Although white tigers are doubtless more extraordinary than ever, a BRIC money-maker must now be born every minute rather than once in a generation.

    25 February 2021