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