Minari (2020) Review: Planting Roots in Arkansas

Is Minari worth watching?

Yes. Minari is a warm, clear-eyed immigrant drama whose small scale hides a great deal of feeling, and its performances, above all Youn Yuh-jung’s as the grandmother, are a pleasure to watch. Lee Isaac Chung draws on memories of his own childhood to tell a story about ambition and belonging without sentimentality or speeches. The reservation is its unhurried, episodic structure: this is a film of moments rather than momentum, and some viewers will wish it pressed harder on its conflicts.

What is Minari about?

Minari follows a Korean American family who move from California to a plot of land in rural Arkansas in the 1980s. The father, Jacob (Steven Yeun), wants to grow Korean vegetables and sell them to the immigrant communities in the cities; his wife, Monica (Han Ye-ri), is far less convinced that a mobile home in the middle of nowhere is a step up. Their young son, David, has a heart condition, which makes the distance from a hospital more than an inconvenience.

To help with the children, Monica’s mother, Soon-ja (Youn Yuh-jung), comes from Korea to live with them. She swears, plays cards, cannot bake cookies and is nothing like the grandmother David had imagined, and the friction between the two becomes the film’s comic and emotional heart.

Chung wrote and directed the film, which runs 115 minutes and is spoken largely in Korean, with English woven through the family’s dealings with neighbours, church and work. It won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 2020, and Youn’s performance went on to win the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.

A grandmother who steals the film

Youn Yuh-jung plays Soon-ja with mischief rather than saintliness, and that choice keeps Minari from turning into a greeting card. She is blunt, funny and slightly chaotic, and her scenes with Alan Kim, as David, have the unforced rhythm of a real child sizing up an adult he does not yet trust. Their relationship moves in small steps: a shared joke, a walk to the creek, the patch of the title plant she sows beside the water.

Steven Yeun is equally good in a quieter register. Jacob’s pride and stubbornness could have made him hard to like, but Yeun lets you see how much of his drive comes from needing to prove something to himself. Han Ye-ri gives Monica a tired, intelligent resistance, and the marriage scenes, often conducted in lowered voices so the children will not hear, are some of the most truthful in the film.

Soil, faith and a very American dream

Chung is precise about the texture of this life. Lachlan Milne’s photography turns the Arkansas fields into something both beautiful and indifferent, and Emile Mosseri’s score adds a soft, hymn-like ache without telling the audience what to feel. The details carry meaning: the well Jacob digs, the chicken-sexing job the parents take at a hatchery, the local church where the family is welcomed a little too eagerly.

Will Patton’s Paul, a devout farmhand who helps Jacob with the land, is a lovely supporting turn, an eccentric figure the film treats with respect rather than condescension. Through him and the church community, Minari looks at the rural South with curiosity, not suspicion, which makes its version of the American dream feel lived-in rather than symbolic.

Where the quiet works against it

The film’s restraint has a cost. Because Chung prefers observation to confrontation, some of the family’s tensions simmer for a long time without developing, and the middle stretch can feel like a series of lovely vignettes rather than a story with a direction. Monica, in particular, is sometimes defined more by her doubts about Jacob’s plan than by an inner life of her own. Viewers used to bigger dramatic swings may find it slight.

Who should watch Minari?

It suits anyone who enjoys intimate family dramas, stories about immigration and belonging, or films built around performance rather than plot. It is gentle enough for older children and teenagers to watch with parents, with occasional strong language and some tense family arguments, and its under-two-hour runtime makes it an easy evening choice.

If it works for you, try these next:

• House of Hummingbird, another patient Korean family drama seen largely through a young person’s eyes.
• Broker, Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Korean-language story about an improvised family on the road.
• Parasite, a far sharper, darker take on a family trying to climb.

The verdict

Minari is a modest film in scale and a generous one in spirit, a portrait of a family working the land and each other’s patience. Its quietness occasionally tips into drift, but the acting, especially from Youn Yuh-jung and Steven Yeun, makes it one of the most affecting immigrant stories of recent years.

Rating: 4/5