Butler's Cinema Scene

Clockwise from upper left: Steven Yeun, Youn Yuh-jung, Yeri Han, Noel Cho, Alan S. Kim

“MINARI” My rating: B (VOD)

115 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

Like the young characters in “Minari,” writer/director Lee Isaac Chung grew up as the offspring of Korean immigrants in rural Arkansas in the 1980s.

Based on that knowledge it can be safely said that big chunks of this excellent family drama are autobiographical.

But even if we knew nothing about Chung’s background, “Minari” is a so crammed with moments of overwhelming specificity that you’d immediately identify it as having been pulled from real-life experience, particularly the experiences of a child now looking back with adult eyes.

Jacob (Steven Yeun) and Monica (Yeri Han) are a Korean couple who, after years on the West Coast, have relocated to rural Arkansas.

Jacob is tired of his job sexing chicks for a poultry producer (basically he spends all day staring at the nether regions of fluffy yellow creatures; the males are destroyed for being of no commercial value). He has uprooted Monica and their children David and Anne (Alan S. Kim, Noel Cho) and deposited them in a rather rundown doublewide trailer in the middle of a pasture.

Jacob is bent on realizing his American dream; to be precise, he wants to produce Korean vegetables for his many fellow countrymen now living in the USA and craving a taste of home.

Monica is dubious.  She’s not thrilled with their shabby  new digs. Jacob’s entrepreneurial quest strikes her as more selfish than practical. She frets that little David, who has a heart murmur (he’s always being told not to run, and always does, anyway) is an hour away from emergency medical care. These tensions will put no little strain on the marriage.

“Minari” contrasts the adults’ marital and economic woes against the fascination of little David with his new world.

Jacob has no shortage of issues in making his dream a reality. He must find a source of water for  his crops, which brings in a fellow with a divining rod; he goes into debt to purchase a used tractor.

And he takes on as a hired hand Paul (Will Patton), a scuzzy loner whose religious mania drives him to spend his weekends dragging a large cross down rural byways. Initially you wonder if Paul isn’t some sort of ticking time bomb; actually he’s a pretty decent fellow.

What plot the episodic “Minari” possesses only kicks into gear with the arrival of Monica’s mother Soonja (Youn Yuh-jung) from the old country.  The old lady is supposed to watch the kids and provide domestic help, but it quickly becomes apparent to young David that she’s more Uncle Buck than doting Nana.

It’s a bit weird…as David slowly matures, Soonja seems to be regressing into a second childhood. Her slide into something like dementia will hold grave consequences for the little family.

But before that happens Soonja becomes a beloved playmate. She even launches her own horticultural project, sprinkling on a creekbank seeds of minari (a sort of Asian parsley) she has smuggled from Korea. The herb not only tolerates its new environment but flourishes, a metaphor, one hopes, for the eventual success of the family venture.

“Minari” is specific, yes. But it’s also universal.  Jacob’s quest for economic self improvement resonates across years and cultures; the comforting (and exasperating) ties of family and marriage  mold all of us.

| Robert W. Butler