A work of extraordinary delicacy, poignancy and tenderness: Minari reviewed

In the summer of 2018, when film-maker Lee Isaac Chung was on the brink of giving up filmmaking and had accepted a teaching job, he found himself writing a list of what he remembered growing up as a Korean-American in rural America in the 1980s. These ‘little visual memories’ included, for example, the lunch pails his parents would take to their jobs at the chicken factory, or the minari — a herb used in Korean cookery and medicine — his father planted on their farm. This list became the film Minari, which lately won a Golden Globe and has been nominated for six Oscars. It is a work of extraordinary delicacy, poignancy and tenderness. Whatever else, teaching’s loss is entirely our gain.

A Korean-American family, headed by father Jacob (Steven Yeun) and mother Monica (Yeri Han), arrive in a small Arkansas town where he is hoping to start a farm. They’ve moved with their two American-born children, Anne (Noel Kate Cho) and six-year-old David (Alan S. Kim, cute as a button; you will so want to pinch his cheeks). But while Jacob has bought some version of ‘the American Dream’ his wife is not on the same page. She is not impressed with their accommodation, given it’s a mobile home mounted on breeze blocks. Also, it’s an hour from any hospital and she is worried about David, who has a heart murmur. (‘Don’t run, David!’, both parents are always yelling.) This is as much about the survival of a marriage as anything. Normally, I would take the woman’s side, but as Jacob puts it: would they wish to return to the city and the chicken factory where they both worked gendering baby chicks, which involved looking at ‘chicken butts’ all day? Personally, I would not.