Based on the director’s own upbringing in the 1980s as a seven-year-old Korean American boy, the film has on-screen father Jacob (Steven Cheung) disapprovingly moving his son, David, and daughter from the West Coast to rural Arkansas with frustrated wife, Monica — she’s irked by the relocation to a mobile home in the middle of nowhere. Troublemaker David and his sister are bored by the vast plains, but have their lives quickly disrupted when their grandmother arrives from Korea to live with them and set the family dynamic straight again, but life gets in the way, and things don’t go as planned. Meanwhile, Jacob passionately wants to use their 50 acres of crop to open his own farming business of Korean vegetables, throwing the family’s finances in danger, his marriage out of loop, and the stability of the family into freefall. Chung tackles the American Dream with the highs and lows of this Korean emigree family. There are shades of Ozu’s bittersweet nature here, ditto the perceptive details that made the Japanese master’s films so indelibly memorable. Each character is fully sketched by Chung, who throws episodic melodrama at his audience to tell his story. A film like “Minari” getting overpraised could be dangerous to its overall impact. Make sure to go into this film fully aware of its simple but substance-filled frames. The lack of any showiness is, in fact, part of Minari’s charm, every scene was carefully chosen by its director to further advance the narrative of this deeply personal statement.
Score: B/B+
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