Content area
Full Text
Publication: The Georgetown Voice, , Georgetown University , Washington, DC
“Minari is wonderful, minari is wonderful.” So goes the song that seven-year-old David (Alan S. Kim) sings as his grandmother, Soon-ja (Youn Yuh-jung), tends to the Korean herb from which Lee Isaac Chung’s semi-autobiographical film takes its name. Minari can grow anywhere, much like a weed, and can be used in almost anything—kimchi, soups, stews. The immigrant experience requires that same resilience and adaptability, which makes Minari (2020) a fitting title for this intimate story about a Korean family who plants new roots in Arkansas in the 1980s.
Married in Korea, Jacob (Steven Yeun) and Monica Yi (Han Ye-ri) moved to California where they had two children, Anne (Noel Cho) and David. Disillusioned by a decade of thankless factory work, Jacob decides to abandon city life and purchase a mobile home on a plot of land in Arkansas to grow and sell vegetables to the increasing number of fellow Koreans migrating to the middle of the United States. It seems like a logical step toward achieving what he, and so many other immigrant parents, came to America to do: provide for his family and give them a better life. But where Jacob sees a temporary stepping stone, Monica sees a home on wheels that could cause the family both emotional and, in the case of a tornado, literal instability.
Minari reaches its stride when Monica’s mother arrives from Korea and meets her American-born grandchildren for the first time. Soon-ja’s authentically Korean presence alters the fraught dynamic between Jacob and Monica, but her relationship with David is the true heart of...