115 min | PG-13 | February 12, 2021 | A24
A Korean immigrant family plants a farm in rural Arkansas and bets everything on dirt nobody else wanted. Jacob chases the American dream while his marriage and his savings drain into the ground. The miracle is how small Lee Isaac Chung keeps it.
Jacob Yi moves his family from California to a patch of Arkansas farmland in the 1980s. He plans to grow Korean produce and sell it to the immigrants arriving across America. His wife Monica wants a steady paycheck and a real house, not a trailer parked on cinder blocks. Their young son David has a heart condition that hangs over every decision. The film is the American dream told from underneath. It watches what that dream costs the man who chases it and the people who have to live with the chaser.
Steven Yeun plays Jacob as a man who needs the farm more than the farm needs him. He carries pride and stubbornness in equal measure and lets you see both feeding the same fire. Han Ye-ri plays Monica with an exhaustion that never tips into self-pity. She loves Jacob and watches him gamble their life with clear eyes. Youn Yuh-jung plays the grandmother Soonja as profane, card-playing, and entirely unsentimental. Alan Kim plays David as a boy who decides Soonja is not a real grandmother and slowly, grudgingly changes his mind.
Lee Isaac Chung writes and directs from his own childhood and refuses to inflate it. The camera sits low and close, often at the height of the children, and lets the flat Arkansas light do the work. The score moves like water under the surface and never tells you how to feel about a scene. Chung frames the farm and the trailer as equals, the dream and the cramped reality held inside the same shot. He trusts long takes and quiet rooms instead of cutting to montage. The film earns its emotion by the inch.
Minari resists every easy version of itself. It does not lecture about race and it does not turn hardship into uplift. The minari of the title is a hardy plant Soonja sows by the creek, a green thing that grows wherever it is dropped and asks for nothing. That is the family. Chung lets the metaphor stay quiet and never stops to explain it. He has made a film about endurance that understands endurance is not the same as triumph.