A year ago, Minari was a favorite at the Oscars, eventually winning one of its six nominations.  I’ve finally caught up to it; I still haven’t seen most of last year’s contenders, much less those for 2021.  But this is a major film which deserves to be reviewed, so here we are.  I wish I could say I liked the film more than I did.

Lee Isaac Chung wrote the story based on his own childhood, and directs it with an eye toward the American Dream.  A Korean immigrant family, fresh from California, travels to Arkansas to start a farm in the 1980s.  The father, Jacob (Steven Yeun), works like crazy to make his farm work while the mother, Monica (Yeri Han), continues to work in a chicken sexing plant to keep cash coming in.  The two kids, Anne (Noel Cho) and David (Alan S. Kim), explore the area and learn to live without much attention paid to them.  This changes when Grandma Soonja (Yuh-Jung Youn) arrives to help care for them.  The film follows the family’s effort to succeed at farming in the face of local issues, bias and catastrophe, both natural and human.

All this fits nicely into a long tradition of films about the difficulty and travails of farming in rural America, from the excellent The Grapes of Wrath, The Southerner and The Yearling in the 1940s to Places in the Heart, Country and The River, all released in 1984.  These stories illustrate the obstacles these brave folks have to overcome just to grow food for the rest of us, and the sacrifices they make in order to do so.  Minari follows that same path, adding the element of racial uniqueness to the mix, which helps bring an added perspective to the family’s quest to become successful American farmers.  But writer-director Chung stacks the deck, so to speak, so strongly against the family that I became convinced that they would not succeed.  Catastrophe occurs a couple of times to them, and more is potentially just around the corner.  Internal strife among the family made me believe that should they continue to try to farm the land, they would go bankrupt and lose everything.

The film itself remains hopeful, indicating that things are still progressing, and that they even be getting some help.  I was not convinced.  It’s a strange thing when a movie says one thing but a viewer like me becomes convinced that it is wrong, and the whole exercise is doomed to fail.  I know just enough about farming to know when a job is too big for the people attempting it.  So for me, Minari became an exercise in futility; I wanted them to give it up and move back to California where they could make enough money to raise the kids and actually have a life together.  That’s more important than Jacob’s dream about having his kids respect his life choices.  I might be misreading this well-intentioned movie, but that is my honest reaction to it, and I cannot recommend this as an inspiring drama.  ☆ ☆.  9 February 2022.