Happy Friday and 6th anniversary to The Dress debacle! (The picture is white/gold but you have to squint to see blue/black.)
Another movie very much worth you checking out today: Night of the Kings, a potential Best International Film nominee at the Oscars, is now available for virtual cinema rentals! If you need more convincing, here’s my positive review for /Film out of TIFF last fall.
More good news is coming from the vaccine front — here’s the data:
And here’s some good anecdotal proof from The Washington Post today: “The joy of vax: The people giving the shots are seeing hope, and it’s contagious.”
Now, what you came for…
DAY 351: Minari (available for $20 on PVOD through various digital providers)
A traditional trope in movies with childhood protagonists is to somehow filter the movie through their eyes, placing us in the vantage point of their own naivete. The most famous example may be Steven Spielberg frequently shooting at the eye level of Elliott in E.T. to replicate the way he’s always looking up at the adults around him. But it’s usually done more on a narrative level through a plot device like a fantastical or imagined element that represents the character’s inability to grasp the world in grown-up terms.
No such luxury exists for pint-sized David (Alan Kim, your new favorite child actor) in Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari. As a seven-year-old Korean-American newly planted in rural Arkansas, he doesn’t have the privilege of escaping the realities that surround him. He’s got a heart condition that makes him acutely aware of his own mortality and physical limitations in a way that most kids do not have to face. His family’s economic status as strivers trying to make it big outside of a metropolitan immigrant community leaves them socially isolated and relegate in the tight confines of a mobile home, where David and his older sister Anne (Noel Kate Cho) can hear most of the stark conversations between their parents. The insistence of patriarch Jacob (Steven Yeun) that they can strike it rich by starting a farm on untapped soil also means that the kids don’t really get to experience a contemporary childhood; they’re brought into the family business and treated as engines of productivity.
This is the underbelly of Reagan-era prosperity, rendered with poignancy rather than overt politicization by Chung. Minari is about the siren song of success that calls out to Jacob and the seeds of destruction it leads him to sew near the family tree. He’s fixated on doing better, not necessarily being better, and the distinction quietly undermines the stability of his family as they struggle to make the best of their new surroundings. The lack of structure particularly weighs on his wife Monica (Han Ye-ri), even with her own aging mother (Youn Yuh-jung) there to provide some semblance of familiarity. Is the American dream what you make or who you make it with?
It’s often immigrant communities who believe in its promise most strongly … and thus are among the first to realize the holes in its mythology. Chung mines the first generation American experience for all its comedy and tragedy alike. More than any genre trappings, however, he just grounds David’s experiences in a textured reality. Minari has a soulful touch, not because Chung is looking up at the heavens. It’s because he’s down on the earth, feeling the hopes and fears of the characters as they work to grow something miraculous from the dirt toward the sky.
Be good to yourselves and to each other,
Marshall