4.5/5
Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari is a gorgeous and painfully honest film about the immigrant experience. So many of these stories romanticize the immigrant experience and the big dreams that cause families to seek out a better life. But Chung is a far more subtle and nuanced filmmaker. Drawing from his own experience as the child of immigrants, he clearly shows how the father’s stubbornness and pride, a mistaken belief that financial success will solve all of his family’s problems, leads to a willingness to lose his family for the sake of his dream. A lesser filmmaker would have drawn a simplistic hero/villain dichotomy here, but Chung allows for the messiness in family dynamics to be on full display, acknowledging the hurt and pain that can build up between spouses over the years due to unmet expectations, extreme poverty, and emotional withholding. And through it all, he never loses any warmth or compassion for his characters – in part because of the stellar performances of the entire cast. It is a little disappointing to see the film dip briefly into overwrought melodrama toward the end – everything else is so quiet and understated – but the film pulls back and manages to avoid falling into some of the pitfalls that the trope it embraced could have led to in its final moments. Even with that minor quibble, this is an astonishing film – one of the best of the year.
