It Grows Anywhere

Minari a film by Lee Isaac Chung.  With Alan Kim, Yeri Han, Noel Choe, Steven Yeun, Will Patton, Youn Yuh-jung.  Amazon Prime.  *****

The wonderful thing about Minari is how ordinary it is.  When I heard that it was about a Korean family trying to settle themselves in Arkansas, I figured there would be all kinds of discrimination and prejudice on display.  Actually, whatever people were feeling, they treated the Korean family rather well.  There’s one scene where an Arkansas boy approaches David (Alan Kim), the youngest and most engaging person in the family, and says something like “How come your face is so flat?”  David replies, “It isn’t flat.”  And the kid says, “Okay, want to come over to my house?”

The father of the Korean clan, Jacob (Steven Yeun), is an expert in determining the sex of young chicks, a vitally important function in a business where the males are discarded, and literally go up in smoke.  He performs that task at California speed.  His wife Monica (Yeri Han) is only at Arkansas speed.  Both of them work to make money because it is Jacob’s hope to create a farm on his fifty acres to sell Korean vegetables to the growing Korean market in the Southwest.  The time is the early eighties.  But because they are out in the country away from any Korean community, they need a babysitter to look after the children, David and his older sister Anne (Noel Choe).  They decide to bring over Monica’s mother Soonja (Youn Yuh-jung).

The good news is that they have fifty acres in a beautiful spot (where the temperature sometimes climbs to 108 degrees).  The bad news is that, to Monica’s considerable surprise, they’re living in what I believe is called a double wide trailer, though as trailers go it’s not bad.  Soonja has not seen her daughter in years, and has never met her grandson, who is shy of her, and complains that she “smells like Korea” (all grandparents have some kind of weird smell.  I say that as a grandfather).  She also has a salty vocabulary and soon becomes addicted to professional rasslin’ on TV, apparently thinking it’s for real.  She loves to play cards with her grandchildren, where her expletive-filled Korean vocabulary comes into play, and she likes walking out in nature, finding a little creek beside which she can plant minari, a parsley like plant that she claims you can eat with anything.

Jacob is a man with a vision.  He may be the greatest sexer of chickens in the world (or whatever it’s called), but he doesn’t want to do that kind of immigrant work for the rest of his life.  He wants to have his own business, and believes there is a real market for the crop he wants to bring in.  Along the way he runs into a strange guy named Paul (the marvelous Will Patton) who fought in the Korean war, believes he can locate water by dowsing (there’s some evidence that he can) and is also a strange kind of Christian, speaking in tongues and performing weird exorcisms.  On Sundays, instead of going to church as the Korean family does, he walks down the road bearing a huge cross.  That’s his form of worship.  The kids who pass him in the church bus laugh at him.  One says he lives on dirt floors and shits in a bucket.

Monica, unfortunately, doesn’t share Jacob’s vision.  She misses the Korean community back in California, misses having a community at all, stuck in the middle of nowhere.  She thinks that things like friendship and feeling safe and comfortable are more important than having some grand vision.  They got married in Korea, as they remember later, to save each other, but their ideas of what that involves have diverged.  And they fight a lot, even when their children create paper planes that say Don’t Fight and throw them into the fray.

Monica also worries a lot about David, who has a serious heart murmur.  “Don’t run, David,” is a common refrain early in the movie.  Soonja suspects that’s a lot of hooey, and thinks David is a healthy happy boy, even though he has trouble accepting her presence in his house.  At one point he tricks her into drinking his pee (passing it off as Mountain Dew).

Jacob has the problems any novice farmer might have.  His water supply eventually dries up (he should have let Paul do the dowsing) and he has to use water meant for the house, so the house’s water supply also goes dry.  The sure market he thought he had in the Korean community in Texas falls through.  With the help of Paul and his weird exorcisms, he recovers from these things, and finds a new market.  But then a real disaster happens, the kind that no one could have foreseen, and almost does him in.

This isn’t a movie about a stupid novice farmer who screws everything up.  It’s not about a difficult adjustment to a new country, or a new section of the country (they adjust remarkably well).  It’s really about the problems any family might have, differences of opinion between a husband and wife, a little boy who doesn’t like having his strange grandmother in his house, the difficulties of getting a new business off the ground.  But just because it’s so ordinary, it’s extraordinarily touching.  There’s no suggestion at the end that they live happily ever after.  There is a suggestion that they recover from disaster, with the help of the minari that the grandmother planted and that nobody paid attention to, making her speech about this vegetable sound prophetic.

“Minari is truly the best. It grows anywhere, like weeds. So anyone can pick and eat it. Rich or poor, anyone can enjoy it and be healthy. Minari can be put in kimchi, put in stew, put in soup. It can be medicine if you are sick. Minari is wonderful, wonderful!”

That last sentence is how I feel about the movie.