"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 la…