Sometimes technique is so showy that it overwhelms a movie, but there’s also technique that dominates by flaunting its modesty. That’s the kind on display in “Minari,” Lee Isaac Chung’s quasi-autobiographical drama about growing up, as the child of Korean immigrants, in rural Arkansas, in the nineteen-eighties. (The film “opens” online for two weeks at Film Forum and at A24’s virtual cinema, starting Friday.) As a result, what’s original, particular, and personal in the story gets reduced to the familiar dramatic conventions used to tell it.
As a young boy, David Yi (Alan Kim) moves from California to rural Arkansas with his family—his older sister Anne (Noel Kate Cho) and their parents, Monica (Yeri Han) and Jacob (Steven Yeun). In Arkansas, they live in a mobile home propped up on blocks amid a large tract of vacant land, which Jacob plans to turn into a farm that will support them. But the new surroundings spark a confluence of family conflicts—some that arise, and other, longstanding ones that are quickly exacerbated. For starters, Jacob seems not to have made clear to Monica that they’d be living on an undeveloped and isolated property, and in a mobile home.
Monica and Jacob have long been at odds over money—they have been in the United States for a decade but have little to show for it. (This, he reminds her, is because, by Korean tradition, he, as his parents’ eldest son, has had to provide for family back home.) In Arkansas, both Jacob and Monica work as chicken sexers at a hatchery—that’s what Jacob did in California, and he’s considered exceptionally good at it—until he leaves to get the farm started. Jacob has long been bored and frustrated by his repetitive, monotonous labor, and his dream of the farm is as much a matter of independence and creative energy as it is one of profit. David was born with a heart murmur and requires frequent monitoring (he isn’t even allowed to run), and, in case of an emergency, the farm’s great distance from the nearest hospital worries Monica. In their new home, she’s angry, frustrated, and desperately lonely; though there are a handful of Korean immigrants in the area, she hardly connects with them. So to give Monica companionship, and to help with child care, the family brings her widowed mother, Soonja (Yuh-jung Youn), over to live with them.
Soonja’s arrival transforms David’s life. She is wise and loving, gruff and tender, profane, impulsive, and fiercely devoted to her bright and burdened grandson. Meanwhile, Jacob’s efforts to start the farm are greatly aided by a neighbor named Paul (Will Patton), an effusive, awkward Christian mystic who, when the spirit moves him, speaks in tongues. A gregarious hermit, Paul is something of a local laughingstock, but he is a knowledgeable farmer; he quickly befriends Jacob and offers his experience and labor. (It’s never made clear whether he’s paid or merely lending a hand.) Jacob’s enthusiasm for the farm makes him overweeningly optimistic about his endeavor. In quest of a place to dig a well, he repudiates the services of a dowser—he boasts that “Korean people use their heads”—only to risk losing his entire crop when the well he digs runs dry. That arrogance sets in motion a chain of misfortunes that start small and end up catastrophic.
The movie takes note of the business of farming, but only glancingly; it delineates family relationships and bonds with townspeople in quick, sharp touches. Its sketch of the parents’ marriage resounds with quietly painful confrontations. But most of the best things in the movie, arising from Chung’s fine and subtle sense of observation and the ardor that he brings to them, are undercut by their presentation. The movie’s anecdotes and observations may be personal, but they are filmed with an utter lack of subjectivity—whether from the filmmaker or the characters. History is winked at, with glancing references to the Korean War, once by an American character and then by a Korean. Otherwise, the movie is a blank framework that pre-organizes the story to the essential information needed for the plot and the significant character traits that explain it. The movie (and, by implication, the memorious observer, David) never gathers a rich and varied enough range of perceptions to suggest a lived-in depth of experience or idiosyncrasies of character. This is a familiar style, an academic realism of calculated understatement that maintains its restraint even in the midst of terrifying events and grave danger.
The narrow and merely illustrative drama is matched, unfortunately, by an impersonal cinematography that fails to suggest texture or intimacy. The images depict what’s in the script, not the characters’ lives; between the scenes, neither the characters nor the story seem to exist. As for a sense of place, it’s approximate: locations play like sets, with neither a sense of space nor a sense of touch; the landscape is reduced to a few illustrative shots. The actors are both charismatic and talented (Yeun, of course, is the best known of the cast, and Youn is a veteran of many of Hong Sang-soo’s films and of Im Sang-soo’s “The Housemaid”), yet here their performances are contained; they bring out the logic of the story without allowing emotion to expand idiosyncratically beyond it. Despite the charm and nuance of Youn’s performance, her role is drawn from a deck of clichés not unlike those of Glenn Close’s character in “Hillbilly Elegy.” The result is to turn particular experiences general, to render strange ones plausible, exceptional ones average.
For a movie centered on a child’s experience (David is far more prominent in the action than Anne is), “Minari” oddly neglects curiosity and wonder, fantasy and terror. The strongest moments in the movie are the few that evoke the anxious shadows of David’s view. One day, he overhears his mother explaining to his grandmother that he’s in danger of dying. That night, before going to sleep as usual, in the bed next to his grandmother’s, he asks whether he’s going to die, and she dismisses the fretful prayers and rites with which his mother has raised him as foolish. (When she tells him to stop worrying about Heaven, he asks, “But what if I go to Hell?”) They’re the scenes that come closest to suggesting the blend of gravity and innocence, of fear and the fear of its expression, that makes the child’s inner life deep and strange and singular. Elsewhere, Chung’s teeming recollections and extrapolations are muted by the reductive conventionality of their depiction. “Minari” ’s style is a disheartening example of the gravitational pull that such conventions exert on the cinema at large.
