Minari is a Wonderful (Wonderful) Portrayal of Humanity’s Resilience
Minari succeeds at telling a brilliant, awe-inspiring story of how our commitment can lead to great success and a better quality of life.
“Wonderful wonderful Minari wonderful” are words sung by one of the Minari’s central characters, David (Alan S. Kim), as his grandmother teaches him (Youn Yuh-jung) how incredible of a plant minari is. Those were also words I spoke when the end credits appeared. Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari was truly a wonderful (wonderful) experience on the resilience of the human spirit and is, in my opinion, the best film of the 2020–2021 awards season.
Minari follows the Yi family as they move from California to Arkansas in the 1980s. The father, Jacob (Steven Yeun), hopes to pursue his own version of the “American Dream” by hoping to grow a garden full of Korean vegetables. However, the “dream” is more difficult to realize as envisioned by Jacob as his focus on an unrealizable “American Dream” is harming his relationship with his wife (Han Ye-ri) and kids.
Minari’s plot is rather simple or practically non-existent. The “quest” of succeeding at something permeates in the background of a “slice-of-life” film that offers the purest form of humanity possible. “Slice-of-life” films aren’t usually memorable, as they never properly study the human spirit. They’re normally filled with emotional manipulation and an incredible amount of sappy, overly-melodramatic dialogue, a tactic that Richard Linklater uses too well in Boyhood. Minari never delves into melodrama — it always showcases the best humanity has to offer. Its script has no instances of moral simplicity and/or emotional manipulation.
The “human spirit” is represented in Alan S. Kim’s David, the film's real star. Kim’s performance is raw in its portrayal of an innocent and pure child whose imagination never ends. You immediately coddle up to him and marvel at his antics. Every sequence he is involved in is an absolute treasure to watch. The comedy is naturally funny and feels like something a child would do when he doesn’t know who his grandmother is. A child’s imagination is so vast that if his pre-conceived ideas of who a grandmother should be are destroyed, he could revert to practical jokes, avenging his family for not telling “the truth.”
His facial expressions conveying purity and innocence are fantastically real, that it becomes easy for the viewer to dive into Minari’s simple story and laugh incredibly hard as David progressively learns the American way of life through his father’s dreams and church friend. One simple gesture from David had me in stitches; it brought me back to my days as a child, when everything felt, oh, so wonderful. Nothing can stop a child from achieving their dreams because their conception of the world is so simple he has to “mature” for those imagination bubbles to slowly pop. Minari will bring you back to the days where everything was possible because the world felt so vivid and bright, without knowing the harsh reality we face as human beings.
Minari also brilliantly studies how resilient human beings are in the face of terrible adversity. When life throws you the biggest curveballs imaginable, your survival instincts will either tell you to “give up” on a stable, mildly-enjoyable life or to push forward no matter what. Jacob’s quest to build a garden and succeed at something so their children can finally see his father hope for a better life, instead of working as a chicken sexer until his death, is his version of the “American Dream” he hopes to transmit to David and Anne (Noel Kate Cho).
Jacob will always try to overcome adversity, even if it means losing his marriage and children. Steven Yeun delivers an earnest performance as a determined father who hopes to turn his life around by making his “dreams” of a better life as reality, to show David that dreams are indeed possible if you’re committed to making them true, no matter what happens in your life that tries to prevent them from happening. Because of this, Minari succeeds at telling a brilliant, awe-inspiring story of how our commitment can lead to great success and a better quality of life.
I laughed uncontrollably when David said, “I’m not pretty, I’m good-looking!” and cried once Jacob’s dreams were met with physical and moral challenges because you know his determination is genuine. It’s because of this that Minari succeeds so well. We’re reminded of what we can do if we’re committed to success, without any melodrama or emotional manipulation that many “slice-of-life” films contain. In that regard, Minari is a truly wonderful, wonderful film that begs to be seen whenever possible. You won’t be the same afterward.
