What I’m watching: a poignant film about family

Date: 3/15/2021

In theaters and streaming:  “Minari”

You love to see a movie filmed through the eyes of a child. Children have a way of simplifying the complexities of adulthood, so that the weeds of a situation are far less important than the environment of emotions it creates; this is true in life, and can be particularly useful in storytelling.

“Minari” has a plot that takes class, labor, the American dream and a wavering marriage into account. None of the details of these things are withheld from the viewer, but we experience much of them as observers with the film’s main character, a delightful but troubled little boy named David (Alan Kim). And because of that, the tumultuous family drama that unfolds is guided and buoyed by the simple and quiet experiences, both wonderful and fearful, of an inquisitive kid.

Take the opening scene, which puts us right in a position we’ve all been in at a younger age: sitting in the backseat of the family car. David inattentively focuses on one thing after the other; he looks out the window at the passing stretches of flatland of his new home state, Arkansas. The eyes of his mother Monica (Yeri Han) are visible in the rearview mirror – following a moving truck, clearly processing and taking things in, though we don’t yet know what she has to say about the family’s situation; to us and David, she merely seems pensive.

The older sister Anne (Noel Cho), the more assured and grounded sibling, is withdrawn to her book in the passenger seat.             

The camera in this scene is a near-uncanny proxy for David’s vision, showing us these sights and figures from a perspective virtually in the first-person. It’s a sensory beginning to the film which introduces not only to some of its characters, but the very context through which it will be shown.

David’s story is simple, but his surroundings are complicated. The Yi family has moved to the heartlands from California because its patriarch Jacob (Steven Yeun) dreams of owning a farm that grows vegetables from his native Korea. His ambition puts a strain on every other aspect of family life: they live in poverty, and the majority of their income is siphoned into running the farm. They are also much lonelier in Arkansas than out west, both because their home is quite literally in the middle of nowhere, and the Korean community in the area is much smaller. As a result, the kids spend most of their time in the house or around the farm with their wily and playful grandmother Soon-ja (Youn Yuh-jung), who has come from South Korea to look after them while their parents work at the local hatchery.

The relationship between Soon-ja and David provides “Minari” with its funniest and most playful scenes. Something about her rubs him the wrong way, and he withdraws from her as kids tend to do to those they don’t care for. He inquires why she doesn’t behave like a traditional grandmother, questioning why she can’t bake, or why she has a proclivity for swearing and cheating. He even, hilariously, retaliates against her presence with an act that would have gotten me grounded for several months.

But his hostility eventually weathers into fondness and friendship, and the two share a bond over enjoying Mountain Dew, playing Korean card games, and taking walks to the secluded riverbed where Soon-ja plants a small garden of the titular herb.

I am most drawn to this aspect of the movie, and to its overall devotion to David’s experiences, despite the main plot belonging to his father and the farm. David behaves mostly like a blank slate, absorbing the senses and information of the world around him, but his relationships and actions are indicative of a very young person at a crossroads.

He is an avatar for Lee Isaac Chung, the writer-director of “Minari,” which is a semi-autobiographical depiction of his own childhood. You can see it not only in the decision to frame much of the film from David’s point-of-view, but also in the nuanced simplicity, and ambiguity, used by the film when parsing the character’s anxieties. Not even David can put a finger on what’s bothering him, so naturally, neither can we.

While I think the film cares about David the most, it is actually Yeun’s character Jacob who fits the bill as the film’s “protagonist,” and I wouldn’t want to diminish his powerful turn as a young man locked in a near-existential challenge to prove himself. The plot is devised around the pursuit of his dream, and his conflict with Monica, whose love becomes more skeptical and jaded as the tumult of building the farm increases. Early in the film, the two explosively argue over Jacob’s priorities (the farm, rather than the family, seems to be his first concern) in a powerful display – though, never losing its perspective, the film cuts to David and Anne making paper airplanes with the message “stop fighting” written on them.

Yeun is a terrific actor, one of my favorites, and his performance as Jacob, a father, husband, and laborer, displays a newfound maturity in a career of playing younger characters less burdened by responsibility and family. Here, Yeun’s character takes on the focus and discipline of someone he clearly wants to become – a righteous father and businessman who’s owned a thriving farm of Korean vegetables for decades – but always conveys the vulnerability and fears that beginning such a substantial new aspiration in life are sure to bring about. He opens up as the film plays out, until it reaches a climax that does everything in its power to make you feel all the emotions.

Then again, all the emotions get felt at one point or another before the climax is even reached; I’m sure that when Chung recollects the childhood he dramatizes here, he feels them, too. “Minari” is as poignant as movies come without rolling into the undesirable spot of being manipulative – not something you see too often.