Minari was the last film we caught before the Oscars, completing our run through the eight Best Picture nominees (and all of the Director and Acting nominees, except for Hillbilly Elegy). Nominated for six films, with Youn Yuh-jung winning Best Supporting Actress, it is a lovely, funny slice of nostalgia base don writer-director Lee Isaac Chung’s childhood, and gives a different take on the immigrant experience in America.
Steven Yeun stars as Jacob Yi, who moves with his wife Monica (Han Ye-Ri, formerly of Hello My Twenties!), daughter Anne, and son David (Alan Kim), the last of whom is Chung’s stand-in in the film. Jacob has brought his family to rural Arkansas, where he intends to build a farm and grow traditional Korean produce he can sell to restaurants and the growing immigrant communities of the American South. He and Monica will work as chicken sexers to earn enough money to get the farm started, but Monica isn’t on board with the whole farming plan, and the whole family has trouble assimilating until Monica’s mother Soon-ja (Youn) arrives to help Monica take care of the kids and provide substantial comic relief.
What happens from there is almost beside the point, although there is certainly drama to come, and the family will be forced to confront the cracks threatening to tear them apart, to choose how they’ll respond when everything is on the verge of falling apart. This is far more a study of its characters, of Jacob and David specifically, and of its time and place – Arkansas in the 1980s, in an overwhelmingly white community that by and large welcomes the Yi family, even if sometimes they don’t exactly go about things in the best ways. Chung’s script is full of heart, and empathy for its characters – there really are no antagonists here other than the vagaries of nature and fate.
Chung tells the story mostly through David’s eyes, although there are a few scenes with his parents by themselves, and the growth of the relationship between David and the grandmother he doesn’t know becomes one of the emotional touchstones in Minari. The movie takes its name from a resilient, edible dropwort, also known as Korean watercress or Chinese celery, that David’s grandmother plants on the banks of a stream near the family’s farm; in addition to the metaphor of the vegetable itself, water, or the lack thereof, is one of the recurring symbols of Minari, showing up right at the start when Jacob encounters a charlatan with a divining rod but refuses to pay him for his “service.” Soon-ja is unflappable, even as David rejects her at first, and her often coarse humor is one of the film’s best facets, and a surprising contrast to her dour, reticent daughter’s exterior affect.
Minari‘s magic is in how Chung manages to take something so small and make it feel so broad and universal; nearly everything in this movie is about the Yi family and what happens within their household, right up until the one big dramatic twist at the end – and even that event functions as another way to explore and demonstrate the way the family holds together. The story is sweet, sometimes bittersweet, but not saccharine, and full of heart. It’s frequently funny, between Soon-ja’s witticisms and the extremely eccentric farmhand Paul (Will Patton), and its tragedies feel real, not forced.
Youn’s win for Best Supporting Actress was well-deserved, and there seemed to be no real pushback before or after her victory. The film was also nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best Actor (for Yeun, who deserved the same honor for Burning but was snubbed), and Best Original Score. I loved Minari, but wouldn’t have voted for it in any of the other categories, just because it was up against two movies – Nomadland and The Father – I liked a bit more. It did, however, make my top 5 among 2020-eligible movies; I’ve seen everything from that cycle I intended to see except for First Cow and a couple of international films. So here’s my almost-final rankings for 2020:
1. Nomadland
2. The Father
3. A Sun
4. Minari
6. Wolfwalkers
7. Never Rarely Sometimes Always
8. Judas and the Black Messiah
9. A Personal History of David Copperfield
10. Borat Subsequent Moviefilm
11. Collective
12. The Nest
13. Boys State
14. Palm Springs
The Other Side of Hope.
Note: I’m on vacation at the moment and thus not checking email or social media. I’m still writing a little, though, because I feel better when I do.
I only have a few 2017 movies I missed and still want to catch, including Israel’s Oscar submission Foxtrot (which made the shortlist but not the final five), but since I’m traveling abroad at the moment a few films that haven’t been released digitally in the US are suddenly available to me. One of those is 2017’s The Other Side of Hope, a really weird-ass Finnish film with a stark message about humanism and the European migrant crisis along with some of the strangest cinematography and editing I’ve ever seen. And that’s before we even talk about the sushi scene.
The film is barely 95 minutes outside of the credits, and the two main characters Waldemar Wikström and Khaled Ali don’t even meet until about an hour into the story. Wikström is an unhappy, apparently affect-less shirt salesman who sells his entire stock, takes his winnings to an illegal poker room to grow them exponentially, and then invests the bulk of it in a failing restaurant with the most incompetent staff you could possibly imagine. Khaled is a Syrian refugee who first appears in a pile of soot or dirt, applies for asylum, and enters the Finnish refugee system, which is depicted here as arbitrary and capricious. It is only when Khaled’s application is denied that fate throws him into Wikström’s path and the dour restaurateur decides to help the Syrian try to stay in the country illegally and eventually be reunited with his missing sister.
The story itself is straightforward if a bit unrealistic at several points – especially anything around the restaurant, which can’t possibly exist with the three stooges running it, including the laziest cook on the planet, the dumbest doorman on the planet, and a waitress who might be the most competent of the three simply because she doesn’t do anything. It’s the way the film is shot that is so jarring; if I didn’t know this was the work of Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki, I would wonder if this was the work of a precocious film student. Kaurismäki, who also directed 2011’s Le Havre has said this will be his last film, has a quirky, minimalist visual style that isn’t much more expansive with dialogue, much of it delivered drily to the point of atonality. That makes the Wikström plot line kind of hard to appreciate until Khaled shows up, since the refugee story unfurls with more emotion, mostly from Khaled telling his own history since he before he left Aleppo and from the friendship he forges with fellow asylum seeker Mazdak. There are weird, lingering shots of still faces and background items. People line up to talk to each other as if in a marching band, and often speak to each other at an obtuse angle that looks completely unnatural, using a flat tone and rarely expressing any emotion – no one cries in the film, and no one laughs.
Once the two plots unite, however, the movie takes a sudden turn towards deadpan humor, some of it extremely funny – including the aforementioned sushi scene, as Wikström attempts to turn the failing eatery into a Japanese restaurant, with preposterous results – even as Khaled’s safety is in danger both from Finnish authorities and from a group of neo-Nazis who attack him more than once on the street. The Finnish people generally come off as kind and open in the movie, despite the few outright racists running around, while the government itself comes off as heartless and ineffectual. The encounter with Khaled seems to light a spark of humanity in Wikström, and maybe even in one of the other employees (not the cook, who appears unable to boil water), but any hope there might be in the film comes from individuals, not form the institutions that, in theory, exist to help such people who have found no help from anyone else.