Ever wondered why Kansas and the ”kansas” part of Arkansas are pronounced differently? It has to do with which white people settled what. The names are both derived from the same Native American tribal root, but the English who took Kansas decided to pronounce the final “s,” which the French who settled northward from Louisiana, opted out of such. The French tend to get about five letters in to any word and blur the rest. Chalk this all up to “stuff I wanted to know.”
Speaking of the silent anguish of Arkansas, today’s film is Minari. It’s about a Korean family trying to make it as first-time farmers in the rural South of the 1980s. I honestly expected racism to dominate this film. I mean, c’mon … Arkansas. This place is south of Ferguson, MO, and rural. I’m happy to say it did not, and good thing, too. The Yi family has enough issues without pushy rednecks making a bad situation worse. Jacob (Steven Yeun) and Monica (Yeri Han) already fight in-between fights and fighting some more. Part of it is about their trailer; part of it is about their son’s heart condition; part of it is about being Korean and moving to Arkansas.
Jacob has a dream of bringing Korean vegetables to other poor Korean saps duped into moving into Trumpland. It’s unclear if Monica has or even gets a dream, but it’s pretty clear that whatever she was hoping for, it wasn’t this. To supplement their income while putting a farm together, the Yis have entered the
lucrative and rewarding profession of chicken sexing. Did you know that egg-selling companies destroy all male chicks? They call it “culling” so it doesn’t sound so monstrous. Gee, you learn something new every day. To keep Monica from yelling at him 24/7, Jacob sends for grandma, so three generations can live in a crappy trailer in rural Arkansas. The key takeaways from grandma’s presence are her desire to plant Minari (sort of a spicy parsley) and the fact that the kids dupe grandma into believing Mountain Dew is something special by calling it “the water from the mountain,” which I suppose is technically correct.
This film is about the American dream, something that doesn’t get talked about much any longer, almost entirely because we as a people don’t believe any longer. The people who insist upon Making America Great Again callously ignore the idea that the American Dream used to be the greatest part of what made us a great people. This is a film that you have to watch to the end, painful as that might be. The journey is long and often frustrating, but the last twenty minutes of Minari are about as moving as any new film I’ve seen this year. I don’t know if the American Dream is dead. I don’t know if this movie is making a case either way. I do know that by the time the film ended, I felt like I’d lived the Yis painful version of the American Dream and wished them well as a result.
Korean Jacob full of ambition and worry
Wanted to create a new farm in a hurry
The American Dream
Still not but a gleam
Maybe they shoulda looked in Missouri
Rated PG-13, 115 Minutes
Director: Lee Isaac Chung
Writer: Lee Isaac Chung
Genre: The farming blues
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: Korean immigrants
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: MAGA
