"Minari": American Dreams
With director Lee Isaac Chung's "Twisters" out soon, I thought I'd finally watch his break-out film, "Minari". Like one of the tornadoes in his new film, it left me in pieces.
Minari, Screenplay & dir. Lee Isaac Chung (2020)
Artistry is divine, according to Marilynne Robinson’s close-reading of Genesis. The trees in Eden are described first as “pleasant to the eye” and only second as “good for food”. This might reveal that God is concerned with our flourishing rather than our mere survival, or that God-given nature is already perfect — the untouched soil yields greater beauty than is produced by the labour of farming. Both ideas are suggested in Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari, which transports us to the wilds of Arkansas in its opening shots.
Jacob Yi has moved his wife and two children from California to pursue his dream of growing Korean vegetables on land he’s bought. The pragmatic reason is to supply the influx of fellow migrants to the area; the deeper reason is that Jacob wants to achieve more with his life than simply saving wages from a factory job. The way Chung shoots Jacob’s land is almost elegiac, a visual ode to a kind of rural simplicity many of us lack. The camera swoons over the fertility of the flowers, the wind rustling the leaves of lush trees, the gentle yellow of sunlight filtered across a blue sky.
But Jacob’s wife, Monica, looks at what they’ve moved to with barely concealed disdain and says, incredulously, “That land is your dream?”
The line separating his view from hers runs right through the heart of their marriage. It is their fundamental flaw. When they first arrive at their new home, Monica takes it in and says to herself, “It just gets worse and worse.” Jacob responds by saying to their kids, “Want to see something even better?” Later, they quibble over the definition of a garden; she claims a garden is small, and he replies, “No — the garden of Eden is big. Like this!”
This minor dispute reveals some major ideas in Minari. One such idea is that the so-called “American Dream” is like a theology, in that it changes with each believer. Monica dreams of city life, of a Korean church with people like her, with friends for her children to play with, and the rush of urban life to lift her out of drudgery. Jacob, meanwhile, seeks something simpler, something more self-sufficient, which he can build with his own hands and that will sustain his family.
The children’s grandmother, who comes to live with them later, never articulates a schematic dream of her own, except that she obviously wants to flout any plan made for her and without her consent. She swears gleefully, becomes enamoured with the faux-violence of American wrestling, and is mischievously grateful at being told she isn’t like a grandmother. She’s pleased to be anything but “usual”.
Perhaps there’s something of this resistance to expectation in Jacob’s rejection of faith. Though Monica wants them to attend a Korean church and teaches their son to pray, Jacob has no time for anything that isn’t “rational”. Does he bristle at the idea of being some kind of caricature, a Korean immigrant attending Korean church? Or is it that he rejects religion as a particularly American phenomenon? When a water dowser touts his trade, Jacob brushes him off, complaining to his son, “Americans! Believing that nonsense!” Although everything about Jacob is a picture-perfect representation of assimilation — from his John Wayne gait and trucker cap to his use of English with English-speaking Americans — maybe he wishes to hold on to something that sets him apart, and that thing is religion.
Jacob does have a faith, though: a works-based theology about how a man ought to be useful. When his son, David, asks him why they toss out the male chicks at the local poultry processing plant, Jacob tells him it’s because “they can’t lay eggs and have no use” — which is why, he goes on to say, that he and his son “should try to be useful”. It’s hard not to get swept up in such labour-focused romanticism. Watching Jacob and his hired hand, Paul, turn over the soil and plant what will eventually yield food that people can eat; seeing them put knowledge to useful action; watching them physically build something that others can use, rely on, and that will outlast them — I felt a little envious as I compared that work to what I do as a writer, which no one can eat, or wear, or quantifiably depend on. There’s a scene in which young David petulantly criticises his grandmother for not being able to cook or bake cookies. “What can you do?” he asks accusingly. I was asking the same of myself.
But the film will not allow us any cheap sentimentality, and the heavy cost of such a life encroaches on the idyllic picture, demanding we take it seriously. The sad fate of the man who’d attempted to farm the land before Jacob is alluded to several times, until finally the father of a new friend reveals to David that the man went “flat broke” and shot himself. “I guess,” says the friend’s father, “it’s what a man does.” There are so many ways to read that line, one of them being a reminder of the dark side of a man valuing himself by his work, by what he can produce. The failures of men who’ve held themselves to such demanding standards have often produced violence, against others and sometimes against themselves. And sometimes the consequences are less dramatic though no less destructive, as when a man like Jacob is willing to abandon his family for the pursuit of his American dream.
That said, there’s nothing cynical about Minari. Its family is complicated and fractured, yet full of love and the glimmer of hope. The film’s exploration of faith is upfront about the strangeness, even silliness, of religion at times while also showing its sincerity and its transformational potential. The church the Yi family attend is somewhat superficial and serves more as a social club than a meeting place with the Divine. Meanwhile, their farmhand’s private act of devotion every Sunday — carrying a large wooden cross on his back along a dusty road — is mocked by the locals, but there’s something quietly profound and moving about it. That’s Minari too — quietly profound and deeply moving.
Marginalia, plur. noun:
“In getting my books, I have always been solicitous of an ample margin … for the facility it affords me of penciling suggested thoughts, agreements and differences of opinion, or brief critical comments in general.”
~ Edgar Allan Poe