Minari (2020): Lessons on the American Dream

By Nick Sansone

In the few months before COVID-19 upended society and the film industry as we know it, I had the pleasure and honor of briefly working part of the film festival circuit in the U.S. After volunteering at the Chicago International Film Festival in October 2019, I was hired to work for a month at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. Even without the knowledge that this would be the last large in-person film festival in the U.S. for 2020 and beyond, it was an incredibly special experience, where I was able to see fifteen feature-length films in packed theaters with enthusiastic audiences that, for the most part, did not end up getting wide theatrical releases.

But there was one film that I ended up seeing twice in two days at Sundance that year, and it was the film that won both the Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award for U.S. Dramatic film: Lee Isaac Chung’s semi-autobiographical Minari (2020). My first viewing of this film, at an 8:15 AM screening with Chung in attendance for a Q&A, was an experience I will not soon forget. While it was absolutely painful to get up and stand in line in the bitter February cold that early, it was completely worth it once I felt this movie’s warm embrace come off of the screen and into Park City’s Egyptian Theatre. Equal parts heartbreaking and hopeful, melancholy and entertaining, and all-around crowd-pleasing, Minari tells a deeply personal immigrant story that transcends its surface-level description by speaking volumes about assimilation, family, faith, coming-of-age, and the American Dream in this specific place and time. This is a really special film.

As the film opens, the viewer is put inside the point-of-view of seven-year-old David Yi (Alan Kim), as he rides in the back seat of his family’s station wagon through the rural country roads of 1983 northwest Arkansas. Soon enough, they reach a plot of land that Jacob (Steven Yeun), the Yi family patriarch, has purchased to fulfill his dream of being a farmer and making money by selling Korean produce, a rare thing in the American South. Tensions immediately arise between Jacob and his wife, Monica (Yeri Han), who hates the land, the mobile home they’re living in, and pretty much everything about their new situation. Meanwhile, David struggles with a heart condition that prevents him from being the energetic carefree boy he aspires to be, and their parents’ initial job situation results in his older sister Anne (Noel Kate Cho) taking care of him most of the time.

Before long, Jacob and Monica decide to have Monica’s mother, Soon-ja (Yuh-Jung Youn), come stay with them in Arkansas, primarily so she can watch the children while they are at work. David is almost instantly hostile toward her, due to her not being the stereotypical sweet grandma who makes cookies and the like. Nevertheless, she slowly begins to succeed in her attempts to bond with him and Anne, teaching them how to play cards and trying to engage David in physical activity against the wishes of his parents. At the same time, the Yi family slowly starts to assimilate into the culture around them. Jacob hires a local man named Paul (Will Patton) to help him on his farm and they slowly become close despite Paul’s obvious eccentricities. Furthermore, a series of incidents that result from the realities of their new situation force the Yi family closer together in a way that they haven’t been before.

Like many of the excellent semi-autobiographical coming-of-age films that have been released in the last few years (i.e., Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird (2017), Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma (2018), Lulu Wang’s The Farewell (2019)), there is not one particular engine driving Minari forward; rather, this is a deeply personal slice-of-life story, where the viewer simply sits and observes the trials and tribulations of the Yi family and David’s coming-of-age. However, continuing one of my favorite independent filmmaking trends demonstrated by the films mentioned above, Minari manages to take its very specific and personal trappings and create a beautiful work of art that should resonate with anyone who has ever felt alienated in a new place or has struggled with familial tension. Beginning with the opening sequence of David and his family approaching their new home and land, Minari envelopes the viewer and makes them feel as if they were a part of the Yi family, with subtle and carefully-crafted cinematography (often low to the ground to emphasize David’s dominant point-of-view) adding greatly to this film’s immersive nature.

Even without knowing how closely Minari is based on writer/director Chung’s own childhood, the strong sense of realism and careful attention to detail throughout the film’s running time often makes it feel like a childhood memory. From the scene where David and Anne throw paper airplanes at their bickering parents to get them to stop, to the larger-than-life way in which Jacob is initially presented from David’s perspective, many moments in this film feel like adult retrospections on their own perceptions as kids. As Chung explicitly acknowledged during his Sundance Q&A, his own experience as a husband and father over the last few years directly informed how he told this story, specifically in the empathetic way this film portrays the Jacob character. And indeed, the contrast between how Jacob is portrayed during his moments with David and his moments with Monica and his hired hand Paul, among others, ground this childhood memory film in a reality that is, in many ways, heartbreaking.

Many of Minari’s strongest moments come in the scenes with Jacob and Monica as their marriage begins to collapse. These scenes, in particular one emotional argument that takes place as the film nears its climax, in many ways represent the most devastating consequence of valuing a certain intangible interpretation of the American Dream over the health and well-being of your marriage and family. Seeing Jacob slowly come to terms with the fact that he’s made this dream of his an idol over his wife and children says more about the dangerous allure of such dreams than almost anything else could. And through Chung’s beautifully natural and realistic writing that culminates in a climactic scene that could have easily been contrived but instead is profound and exquisite, this becomes one of the most mature, nuanced, and insightful cinematic depictions of marriage and family to come along in years.

The film also presents the assimilation process in a beautiful way that does not shy away from racial alienation but also shows that, deep down, most people are decent and accepting of others even if they are ignorant about certain things. This is especially poignant when the family starts attending church and is welcomed by the congregation as family in Christ, even if they are initially looked at as being from another planet. Seeing how David’s future friend Johnnie goes from asking David a casually racist question to having him over at his house for a sleepover also shows the power of genuine love and friendship to bring people together across racial and ethnic boundaries, even in such a place as 1980s rural Arkansas. This is also represented in Jacob’s relationship with his hired hand Paul, himself a Korean War veteran who comes to love Jacob as a brother in Christ. While not explicitly a “faith-based film,” Minari nonetheless presents a more beautiful and insightful depiction of faith and the Christian community through church than many explicitly faith-based films.

And while Minari’s more dramatic and heart-wrenching moments are certainly worth noting, it is also important to mention just how funny this film is. Much of the film’s comic relief comes in the form of Soon-ja, who comes in and disrupts the family’s—and the film’s—equilibrium in a powerful and hilarious way. While cinematic relationships between grandmothers and their grandchildren are certainly nothing new, the manner in which Soon-ja and David butt heads throughout the film provides some much-needed levity that occasionally borders on juvenile (i.e., when David attempts to make Soon-ja drink his urine) but remains genuine and hilarious. And the manner in which David warms up to her throughout the film and how she introduces to him the plant that gives this film its title (the plant “minari” translates to “water celery” in English, and is symbolic in ways I won’t spoil here) adds even more wonderful layers to an already wonderful and special film.

Adding much to the power of Minari as well are the performances. Steven Yeun absolutely deserved all of the awards attention he received for this film, as he communicates both Jacob’s strong, confident, larger-than-life personality as well as his inherent brokenness and selfishness with equal profundity and skill, and it is beautiful to watch. Yeri Han is likewise tremendous in her more understated role as Monica, nonetheless going toe-to-toe with Yeun in their scenes together and channeling her anxiety, grief and frustration with their situation in powerful ways. But the film’s two greatest breakout performances are by Alan Kim and Youn Yuh-jung. As both the film’s dominant POV character and stand-in for writer/director Chung, Kim carries much of this film’s weight on his shoulders and does it with tremendous skill, particularly in the subtle way he softens up to his grandmother. And Yuh-jung absolutely deserved the awards attention she got for her performance, as she managed to play the fun, eccentric comic-relief grandma character effectively while also allowing for some truly heartbreaking moments, especially toward the end. It is a true masterclass of acting.

As I personally approach a period in my life where I reflect on my childhood and am shocked by the reality of certain situations I had no mental grasp on as a child, I think back to writer/director Chung and how he openly reflected on his faith and family and how all of that informed his approach to making this film. For such a deeply personal film—one that is so rooted in Chung’s own childhood and his identity as a son of Korean immigrants—to simultaneously be so universal to the American experience and human experience is nothing short of phenomenal and praise-worthy. Because, ultimately, Minari is about the very things that bind us all together. We all value whatever humans make up our family, we all long for something more than we currently have, and we all strive to believe and have faith in something greater than ourselves. And in this day and age, a film about these things is something that deserves to be seen and shared with everyone.

Minari (2020): Lessons on the American Dream

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