Minari (2021)
Directed by Lee Isaac Chung
A Korean American family moves to an Arkansas farm in search of its own American dream. Amidst the challenges of this new life in the strange and rugged Ozarks, they discover the undeniable resilience of family and what really makes a home.
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16 films that influenced Minari
What critics say influenced Minari
This about as American a story as you can imagine, and Chung — who wrote the screenplay — deftly bypasses cliches and still recalls all the great, tough films in this category from “The Grapes of Wrath” to “Days of Heaven.”
It reverses the basic American migration story, seen in such movies as The Grapes of Wrath (1940), Lost Boundaries (1949), and even The Dollmaker (1984).
An elegant, delicate score from Emile Mosseri subtly amplifies the entire project, while Lachlan Milne’s naturalistic cinematography more than once evokes Days of Heaven in the way it celebrates the American landscape and even infrastructure.
This about as American a story as you can imagine, and Chung — who wrote the screenplay — deftly bypasses cliches and still recalls all the great, tough films in this category from “The Grapes of Wrath” to “Days of Heaven.”
It's calm rural power reminded me a bit of David Lynch's G-rated The Straight Story (1999) actually.
It reverses the basic American migration story, seen in such movies as The Grapes of Wrath (1940), Lost Boundaries (1949), and even The Dollmaker (1984).
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Hollywood has lost touch with the humanism that distinguished the class-struggle story in Jean Renoir’s The Southerner (1945).
It’s “Country” or “The Southerner” or “Jean de Fleurette” but with Korean immigrants tested this time, a family whose problems arrive with them when they got their 50 acres of Arkansas in the mid-1980s.
While taking a Korean perspective on the much fabled “American dream”, it also evokes memories of bittersweet and torrid tales as diverse as Field of Dreams and The Mosquito Coast , where one family member is seemingly risking it all in pursuit of a goal that maybe they alone believe in.
Yuen’s journey lies somewhere between Field of Dreams and Death of a Salesman , a man suffering from his own ambition and tossed about by the winds of fate; it’s a beautiful, meaty role for an actor who’s been taking greater chances like this and 2018’s Burning ; he’s come a long way since The Walking Dead .
It reverses the basic American migration story, seen in such movies as The Grapes of Wrath (1940), Lost Boundaries (1949), and even The Dollmaker (1984).
While taking a Korean perspective on the much fabled “American dream”, it also evokes memories of bittersweet and torrid tales as diverse as Field of Dreams and The Mosquito Coast , where one family member is seemingly risking it all in pursuit of a goal that maybe they alone believe in.
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This dynamic - along with newcomers attempting to fit in with a settled, rural community - are the central focal points in this absorbing American immigrant tale, maybe the best one that this critic has seen since director/co-writer Jim Sheridan’s “In America” (2002), about an Irish family moving to New York City, during the 1980s as well.
As expected, there are elements of “Green Acres” and “The Egg and I,” and their farmer out of water — literally — plots, but “Minari” tills richer loam in defining what it means to be a family, from the petty squabbles to the unity of rallying around a crisis.