[This review is part of the Mercury’s 2021 Portland International Film Festival (PIFF) guide. You can check out all our PIFF reviews here.]
Filled with the ups and downs of everyday life, Minari is a portrait of a Korean family as it grows up, grows old, and grows apart. In a media landscape where Asian-Americans are too often invisible, the film is a landmark for American cinema. Despite telling a quintessentially American story at Best Picture caliber, the film was relegated to the Foreign Language Film category (which it won) at this year’s Golden Nepotism Awards. (They’ll do better at being less racist next year, they promise.)
The film takes its name from a resilient Korean vegetable, emblematic of the resilience of immigrants and families. In pursuit of his American dream, patriarch Jacob (Steven Yeun) moves his wife and two children to rural Arkansas. He hopes to build a farm and a better life, escaping his and wife Monica’s menial job of chicken sexing. Monica (Han Ye-ri) is less than amused at having to move to the middle of nowhere, while trying to hype up her young kids (Alan Kim and Noel Kate Cho) for their grandmother’s arrival.
Although the family is God-fearing, they struggle to assimilate to their new life in the Bible Belt. At a church potluck, an uncharacteristically demure Monica apologizes for her bad English while her children are examined by their Caucasian peers. As is par for the course in 1980s small-town America (really just America, in any time/at any place), the children are subjected to some cringe-worthy racist comments made in the most casual and oblivious of manners.
