Post by Dracula on Dec 19, 2020 19:11:22 GMT -5
Minari(12/17/2020)
It’s been a long and winding year since premiered to much praise at the Sundance Film Festival in January and was picked up by A24, a studio that was kicking ass and taking names the last few years but hasn’t quite known what to do over the course of the pandemic. They’ve been holding most of their movies until later when they can really do theatrical runs, which is probably my preferred move but it’s painful nonetheless. In fact I’m still not sure if Minari is on track for a clear release plan, I watched it through a one-week only virtual cinema thing, but you can clearly envision a world where there wasn’t a pandemic and this would have been perfect arthouse counter-programing in the middle of a summer filled with bigger movies like Wonder Woman 1984 and Soul… though I suppose we’re about to be getting them soon as well so maybe destiny was fulfilled just the same.
The film is set in the 1980s and follows a family of Korean immigrants who had moved from the peninsula to California and then to (of all places) Arkansas where the family patriarch Jacob (Steven Yuen) has a dream of starting a farm for Korean produce that he can sell to ethnic markets. His wife Monica (Han Ye-ri) is skeptical about this plan and isn’t thrilled to be living in a manufactured home but has gone along with his dream just the same and while it’s getting off the ground they need to hold down a day job at a chicken plant. They also decide to bring in Monica’s mother Soon-ja (Youn Yuh-jung) to help around the house with raising the children, David (Alan Kim) and Anne (Noel Kate Cho) as they adjust to their new surroundings. A local man named Paul (Will Patton) helps with the agriculture and they have some luck, but there are great challenges. Getting fresh water to grow the crops becomes a challenge and the financial troubles test Jacob and Monica’s marriage and all the while and David has a heart murmur that becomes a topic of much anxiety for the entire family.
Minari was directed by a guy named Lee Isaac Chung, who has actually made three scripted features previously but I don’t know that any of them really had much of a life outside the festival circuit. I haven’t seen those earlier films but two of them seem like kind of standard American indies and the other seems to be tied into humanitarian work he’s done in Uganda. With this latest film he appears to be taking a more personal approach to the point of making a film that is openly autobiographical. The names here are changed but Chung did in fact grow up in an Arkansas farm and even if you don’t know that autobiographical fact it’s not hard to intuit that the film, while also showing things not directly witnessed by him, is essentially being told from the perspective of the little boy in this house and is ultimately about his early life. His telling of the story seems rather clear-headed, he does have a certain nostalgia for this town and land and has a certain pride and affection for his parents’ desire to make a good life for themselves in a new country but he’s also more than willing to show their flaws; how his fathers’ dreams of success could make him a rather cold parent and husband at times and the mother isn’t always the strongest advocate for herself or for the kids.
That it is so clearly rooted in Chung’s own memories does have a couple of drawbacks, namely that it kind of gives short shrift to his older sister’s story, which I would have liked to see a bit more of given that she probably had a clearer perspective on these events, but having that personal touch probably adds more than it subtracts. The film is primarily in the Korean language (if I were to hazard a guess I’d say its maybe 20% in English), but make no mistake this is an intensely American story. Movies about the immigrant experience are perhaps inherently going to have a bit of extra power and weight when they’re made in the era of Trump even as that winds down here in late 2020 given his attacks on that American institution. Minari doesn’t exactly break the mold in how these stories are told, in fact this could be read as a pretty traditional take on the pursuit of the “American dream” in many ways but that vague familiarity in many ways grounds it within that tradition. In many ways it’s an interesting movie to watch in relation to this year’s other big Sundance movie The Nest, which also deals with a man who’s maybe in a bit over his head convincing his family to make a move they maybe aren’t comfortable with, but this tells a version of that story that a bit less operatic and a bit more optimistic in the end. It’s keenly observed and thoughtful cinema constructed well and what it lacks in novelty it makes up for with truthfulness.
**** out of Four
It’s been a long and winding year since premiered to much praise at the Sundance Film Festival in January and was picked up by A24, a studio that was kicking ass and taking names the last few years but hasn’t quite known what to do over the course of the pandemic. They’ve been holding most of their movies until later when they can really do theatrical runs, which is probably my preferred move but it’s painful nonetheless. In fact I’m still not sure if Minari is on track for a clear release plan, I watched it through a one-week only virtual cinema thing, but you can clearly envision a world where there wasn’t a pandemic and this would have been perfect arthouse counter-programing in the middle of a summer filled with bigger movies like Wonder Woman 1984 and Soul… though I suppose we’re about to be getting them soon as well so maybe destiny was fulfilled just the same.
The film is set in the 1980s and follows a family of Korean immigrants who had moved from the peninsula to California and then to (of all places) Arkansas where the family patriarch Jacob (Steven Yuen) has a dream of starting a farm for Korean produce that he can sell to ethnic markets. His wife Monica (Han Ye-ri) is skeptical about this plan and isn’t thrilled to be living in a manufactured home but has gone along with his dream just the same and while it’s getting off the ground they need to hold down a day job at a chicken plant. They also decide to bring in Monica’s mother Soon-ja (Youn Yuh-jung) to help around the house with raising the children, David (Alan Kim) and Anne (Noel Kate Cho) as they adjust to their new surroundings. A local man named Paul (Will Patton) helps with the agriculture and they have some luck, but there are great challenges. Getting fresh water to grow the crops becomes a challenge and the financial troubles test Jacob and Monica’s marriage and all the while and David has a heart murmur that becomes a topic of much anxiety for the entire family.
Minari was directed by a guy named Lee Isaac Chung, who has actually made three scripted features previously but I don’t know that any of them really had much of a life outside the festival circuit. I haven’t seen those earlier films but two of them seem like kind of standard American indies and the other seems to be tied into humanitarian work he’s done in Uganda. With this latest film he appears to be taking a more personal approach to the point of making a film that is openly autobiographical. The names here are changed but Chung did in fact grow up in an Arkansas farm and even if you don’t know that autobiographical fact it’s not hard to intuit that the film, while also showing things not directly witnessed by him, is essentially being told from the perspective of the little boy in this house and is ultimately about his early life. His telling of the story seems rather clear-headed, he does have a certain nostalgia for this town and land and has a certain pride and affection for his parents’ desire to make a good life for themselves in a new country but he’s also more than willing to show their flaws; how his fathers’ dreams of success could make him a rather cold parent and husband at times and the mother isn’t always the strongest advocate for herself or for the kids.
That it is so clearly rooted in Chung’s own memories does have a couple of drawbacks, namely that it kind of gives short shrift to his older sister’s story, which I would have liked to see a bit more of given that she probably had a clearer perspective on these events, but having that personal touch probably adds more than it subtracts. The film is primarily in the Korean language (if I were to hazard a guess I’d say its maybe 20% in English), but make no mistake this is an intensely American story. Movies about the immigrant experience are perhaps inherently going to have a bit of extra power and weight when they’re made in the era of Trump even as that winds down here in late 2020 given his attacks on that American institution. Minari doesn’t exactly break the mold in how these stories are told, in fact this could be read as a pretty traditional take on the pursuit of the “American dream” in many ways but that vague familiarity in many ways grounds it within that tradition. In many ways it’s an interesting movie to watch in relation to this year’s other big Sundance movie The Nest, which also deals with a man who’s maybe in a bit over his head convincing his family to make a move they maybe aren’t comfortable with, but this tells a version of that story that a bit less operatic and a bit more optimistic in the end. It’s keenly observed and thoughtful cinema constructed well and what it lacks in novelty it makes up for with truthfulness.
**** out of Four
