This week, we're talking about Minari. It had its wide release this Friday, but I managed to sneak in a viewing a few weeks ago. As the latest and greatest product of Asian-American cinema, I’ve spent a lot of time wrestling with my thoughts about it.
When Minari was announced, I was really hoping to love it. I watched and re-watched the trailer. Between the promising storyline, A24's magic touch, and the casting of Steven Yuen — who was incredible in Burning — I was ready to be blown away.
And for starters, Minari had great moments. Yuh-Jung Youn's performance as Soon-ja, the wise and charmingly carefree Grandma. The beautiful tones and dreamy shots. The pockets of hope that remind us why Jacob and Monica set out on this journey in the first place. Lee Isaac Chung deserves all my respect for taking this difficult subject on seriously.
With all that in mind, I finished Minari with a sense that it hadn't lived up to its potential. What I’m still not sure about is whether this should be attributed to Chung's directorial vision or Hollywood’s dated understanding of the Asian Immigrant experience that the team at Minari had to navigate.
There is a scene in which the family attends the neighbourhood church for the first time. David and Anne meet the local kids, and they find themselves at the receiving end of the kind of prejudice you would expect from a small town in Arkansas in the 80s. When I watched this, I figured that Lee Isaac Chung was setting up for a later scene. I was expecting Anne to tell David back at home not to be bothered by this kind of behaviour, or for David to ask why others were treating him this way. So much potential for a powerful scene. Instead, it's never mentioned again.
And it's not just this one scene. Throughout the film, the family struggles to open up to each other about anything. Everyone lives in their lane. The father tries to lift the family out of financial insecurity. The mother prioritises the well-being of the children. The kids are busy with fitting in and making friends (David ends up at a sleepover with the same kid who introduced himself in church with a racial insult, and it's unclear how they bridged that gap so quickly), and David quietly wonders whether he will die from his heart condition. Scene after scene, I was hoping for a conversation that always seemed like it might be around the corner, but never is.
The Grandma — bless her soul — is the only person wise enough to see what's happening with the family. She exposes the kids to some humour within the household and softens the hardline attitudes that both parents harbour, even when David replaces her herbal medicine with something much worse. She brings the family together and gently reminds them of their Korean roots. Though mostly ignored initially, the evidence of her wisdom grows in Minari — both literally and figuratively. It takes a tragedy and the resulting convalescence for the family to realise that Grandma was right all along.
As an autobiographical movie, I was hoping for Chung to share more of his personal reflections through open dialogue between the family. It's a stark contrast from The Farewell, one of my A24 favourites, about an Asian-American coming to terms with her Chinese heritage and cultural traditions. There was no shortage of powerful conversations, and I came out of that film with a better understanding of why things are the way they are back home.
Instead, Minari plays like a highlight reel of uncomfortable memories. I struggled with the emotionally reserved parents of the Yi family. It reminded me of my childhood — both my parents worked ~50-60 hour weeks, and I never really had a heart to heart with either of them until after moving out for school.
When I look at it from this perspective, it's hard to fault Minari for realistically capturing an aspect of my own experience. Maybe I'm projecting how I wish things would have been different by criticising Chung's decision to keep the family emotionally distant. Still, it left me with the same questions that I had when I experienced versions of these events myself.
After watching Minari, I read a few reviews to try to make sense of how I felt. Here's an excerpt from one of them:
The best movies are ones that feel lived-in; the characters feel real, their experiences authentic. Family dramas will often strive to reach this level of realness, but too often they resort to stereotypes and melodrama. Thankfully, Lee Isaac Chung's awards hopeful Minari avoids that typical trap with great success.
There's an important distinction to be made here between characters that are shaped to carefully fit their intended role, and characters that bring the real authenticity of all the nuances of a real person.
The characters are "real" only insofar as they fit the immigrant mould. Beyond that characterisation, there is so much that we don't know about the Yi family. We never learn about their past lives in Korea or even California. We assume that Monica's Dad isn't around. Jacob's family is only mentioned in a fight where his financial support of them is used as ammunition. There's no glimpse of the past in which Steven and Monica were in love. Anne has no real place in the movie other than to fill in the scenes as the fourth member of the family.
It felt like these were trite details to the reviewers, part of an unimportant backdrop that didn't contribute to their core identity as immigrants, and it left me wondering whether Hollywood was ready to accept an Asian Immigrant narrative with more depth than the one-dimensional characters in Minari. Seeing labels like "authentic" and "lived-in" in reviews made me think that the final product of Minari might already be near the acceptable commercial boundary of Chung's creative freedom.
I’ll end on a thought I had after reading Matt Zoller from Roger Ebert’s review that called Minari a "classic immigrant story". I realised that I couldn’t think of a single “classic immigrant story” from Hollywood about the Asian American immigrant experience. So, regardless of my reservations about its unmet potential, Minari is a meaningful achievement. It's a beautiful film that will resonate with many, even if it leaves us with as many unanswered questions and unresolved thoughts as we began with.