Minari (Lee Isaac Chung, 2020) (Patreon)

Let's see: Dreamer dad (Steven Yeun), steadfast but skeptical wife (Han Ye-ri), mostly nondescript older daughter (Noel Kate Cho), adorable little boy with a congenital health problem (Alan Kim), and a vulgar grandma (Youn Yu-jung) who must learn to sand down her rough edges in order to connect with her little grandson. Robert McKee would wet himself over Minari, right down to its title, a colossal metaphor for resilience and the ability to "bloom where you're planted."

If there's one thing you can always count on, it's American capitalism's ability to learn all the wrong lessons from a cultural shift. The runaway success of Parasite represented a major breakthrough for non-action Asian cinema in the U.S. and around the world, to say nothing of the sudden discovery that audiences will read subtitles if you give them something worth watching. This revelation should open doors for foreign language cinema, as well as highly distinctive auteurist films that were previously assumed to be niche items at best.

But following the success of Parasite, mini-major A24 has decided that the embrasure of subtitles has more to do with American audiences' interest in "cultural difference." And while this is not exactly wrong, we can see from A24’s 2020 Oscar contender, Minari, that the company believes that the best way forward is to showcase films that, apart from their primary language and the ethnic makeup of their cast, are indistinguishable from the sort of formulaic pap that Ron Howard might direct.

In many ways, Minari plays like a watered-down version of a Kore-eda film, or perhaps even a mainstream Hollywood remake of Yi Yi. While this seems counterintuitive, think again. Steven Spielberg has already secured remake rights to Kore-eda's 2013 film Like Father, Like Son, and several studios have been batting around the idea of doing an English revamp of his 2018 Cannes winner Shoplifters. Minari, for its part, is an American film, by a Korean-American director, and it is fundamentally about a Korean family moving to the heartland (in this case, rural Arkansas) so that the father (Yeun) can pursue his dream of becoming a farmer.

Everything in Minari is tasteful but dull, guaranteed not to offend. In fact, Chung's film, based on his own childhood, at times resembles a faith-based production more than an "art film," and not just because the Yi family are Christians. No, there is such a thoroughgoing lack of racial acrimony, bordering on color-blindness, that Minari feels aggressively didactic on this point, as if determined to show "blue staters" that "red staters" are accepting of immigrants willing to put in hard work to succeed, and to show "red staters" that, alas, they have nothing to fear from immigration, because people like the Yis are harmless and, if you let your guard down, you might discover you really like kimchi.