Minari: What Is the American Dream?

I didn’t know much about Minari before I watched it, but I knew all about the controversy. While the movie is an American production and tells the story of a Korean-American family in the 1980s who have moved to Arkansas, the movie is only being considered in the Foreign Language Film category at the Golden Globes and Oscars, because the dialogue is almost entirely in Korean. This has led to much outrage about what makes a film “foreign” and how arbitrary this classification has become in an increasingly globalized world. One of my favorite comments about this was in this Book Club discussion of Interior Chinatown, where Andrew Ti noted that half of The Godfather is in Italian, and that’s considered the most American movie ever! Well, now, having watched the film, I must agree. I cannot fathom a movie that is more American than this, language be damned.

Over the course of two hours, you will follow the fortunes of the Yi family. Jacob (Steven Yeun) and Monica (Han Ye-ri) worked as chicken sexers in California (sidenote: you don’t get that many movies about chicken sexers!) but have now moved to Arkansas so Jacob can pursue his dream of running a farm. They have two children, David (Alan Kim) and Anne (Noel Kate Cho), and eventually, Monica’s mother (played by the absolutely brilliant Youn Yuh-jung, who is already racking up Best Supporting Actress nominations at awards ceremonies that aren't discounting "foreign" actors) also comes in from Korea to live with them. It’s a simple story of a hardworking immigrant family that is trying to pursue their dreams and make it big in America, but as the film progresses, you see how much strain the pursuit of the American dream can put on their close relationships. Like many Americans (and almost all men), Jacob thinks money will buy happiness and pursues his dream with a fervor that ignores everything else going on in his family. Meanwhile the young children are forced to endure their parents’ fights and endure the instability around them as the adults figure out what to do. 

I wasn’t sure I cared that much for this film until I got to the end. That’s when everything came to a head and I could see what the movie had been building towards all along. And while yes, this is a drama about an American family, the fact that they are Korean makes it wonderfully unique. There is no horrific racism, and the white people they encounter in their daily lives are nothing but friendly and supportive of their hopes and dreams. There’s a fair amount of comedy as Jacob deals with Paul (Will Patton), a very religious Korean War veteran who he hires to help out with his farm. Jacob is also fond of telling his son to use his mind and not do things like an American. When grandma asks if David will mind sharing his room with her since American kids don’t like to share, Monica quickly says, “he’s a Korean kid.” That struggle to assimilate but still retain their Korean-ness is always at the forefront of this movie, and is never more evident than their meals, which may feature kimchi and chopsticks, but are washed down thirstily with Mountain Dew.

Written and directed by Lee Isaac Chung, Minari is a semi-autobiographical movie about his own upbringing, which is clear in the attention to detail. It is also clear in the fact that much of the focus of this film is on David, but not his sister Anne. It's very typical for boys to have no idea what their sisters were going through during their childhoods, and I did find myself occasionally wondering how that young girl was dealing with all these goings-on. But apart from that quibble, this is a solid script and once again a reminder of how much it matters to allow diverse voices on screen to tell fresh and still unfailingly universal stories. This family is so Korean, but so American, and you can relate to their every joy and heartache. And the fact that you need to read some subtitles to understand what they are saying has no bearing on the fact that your heart can immediately sense how they are feeling.