Few TV series come with such a prestigious pedigree as “The Sympathizer”. Adapted from a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel; co-produced by HBO and top-of-the-line independent film studio A24; co-created, co-produced, co-written and co-directed by Park Chan-wook; also helmed by top Brazilian film director Fernando Meirelles; and co-starring Hollywood mega-star Robert Downey Jr. in no less than five (!) different roles. In fact the miracle is that the show, a miniseries in seven episodes, is never weighed down by the sheer expectations sustaining it. On the contrary, it manages to offer a thrilling, fun and heartbreaking roller-coaster ride into the story of its refugee characters.
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As prestigious as it is, “The Sympathizer” is also a highly unlikely production. After all, none of the main filmmakers or producers involved hails from Vietnam or from the Vietnamese-American community at the heart of the show, apart from the novel’s initial author, Viet Thanh Nguyen, who is credited here as an executive producer (along with the mind-boggling number of twelve others), and part of the cast. The co-creators actually hail from South Korea (Park) and Canada (McKellar). This never comes across as a problem however, partly because the source material is so strong, and partly because the show is as much about Hollywood as it is about Vietnam and Vietnamese refugees.
Episode 1 takes place in Saigon as the city is about to fall to Communist forces in 1975. The show’s protagonist is the Captain (Hoa Xuande, an Australian actor of Vietnamese descent), who is working for South Vietnam’s counter-espionage services. But the Captain, it is revealed from the start, is also a Communist sympathizer and double agent who has infiltrated the South. The whole show is built around the Captain’s duality, as he is also of mixed ancestry (his father was French) and spent enough time studying in the United States to be partly Americanized. How do you make sense of your life when you have, as it were, a double identity and double allegiances? Do you belong to two cultures, or none?
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From episode 2, the show moves to Los Angeles, as we follow the lives of the refugees, who must now think of themselves as Vietnamese-American. This is still told from the perspective of the Captain, a first-person narrator who is also telling this story to a Communist officer in a reeducation camp somewhere in Vietnam, in an undefined future… This framing device adds mystery and suspense: how does the protagonist end up imprisoned by his own comrades? With espionage elements reminiscent of a John le Carré novel, the narrative structure is complex, frequently jumping back and forth in time as the Captain often rewinds the story, revealing key details he “forgot” to mention earlier. This raises a critical question: how much of his account is truly reliable?
This metafictional element is a central feature of “The Sympathizer”, which is not so much, ultimately, about the Vietnamese-American experience (something that can come across as a little frustrating at times). Rather, the show is at heart a satirical commentary about cinema, Hollywood and Vietnam War films in particular. From the very start, audiences are placed in a movie theater in Saigon, showing “Death Wish” (or was it really “Emmanuelle”, wonders our unreliable narrator?). Inside, a brutal interrogation is taking place, as a female Communist spy is being tortured on stage in front of the screen under the harsh glow of a film projector’s spotlight. At the same time, the people watching the proceedings from their comfortable seats clearly refer to it as a movie scene. This throws into grim relief right from the beginning how the show will deconstruct the Hollywood version of the “Vietnam War” – also known in Vietnam, we soon learn, as “the American War”. This is meant to highlight how one-sided, prejudiced and mythologized the War has become in the U.S. and across the West.
This critique reaches its apex in episode 4, the highlight of the series. The Captain becomes a movie consultant on “The Hamlet”, a Vietnam War movie meant to recall the likes of “Platoon” and “Apocalypse Now”. The production soon reveals itself to be a ludicrous reinterpretation of the War that has zero interest in Vietnam, the Vietnamese and their own perspective, while the Captain does his best to put more balance in the portrayal (to his chagrin, for instance, the civilians are not played by actual Vietnamese and are not expected to utter a single line). To do so, he faces an egomaniacal director played by a freewheeling Robert Downey Jr and a psychopath actor (David Duchovny) who has so lost himself into his role that he seems to have stepped straight out of the “Tropic Thunder” jungle.
There is thus a strong comical and satirical element running through all seven episodes, but the show also has its fair share of drama and tragedy – sometimes within the same scene, which is a hallmark of great storytelling. From the rushed evacuation of Saigon at the end of episode 1, to the exploration of the reeducation camp and totalitarian madness in the final installment, “The Sympathizer” is a wild, heartbreaking journey into history and its many complexities. Imperialism and neo-colonialism are implicitly addressed as well (Coca Cola keeps reappearing in one form or another), while stereotypes about race and national origins also play an important part. The Captain uses a book filled with such nonsense, the fictional “Asian Communism and the Oriental Mode of Destruction”, to encode secret messages between the lines for his handler back in Vietnam. This is a clever idea that returns to the idea of storytelling and how narratives of power and oppression can be rewritten and reclaimed. It is one among many ideas that recall the best of post-colonial writers, like Salman Rushdie and his own novel “Midnight’s Children”.
Hoa Xuande is excellent in the lead role, a difficult but deeply rewarding character who undergoes many trials on his way to understanding how important “Nothing” is. The rest of the cast is strong as well, with Sandra Oh standing out as an interesting older lover for the Captain. However, much of the spotlight belongs to Robert Downey Jr in five different roles, physical transformations that again recall “Tropic Thunder” and more than once threaten to upstage Hoa and derail the whole show. But it ultimately enhances the strangeness and uniqueness of the series, while the true significance of Downey’s omnipresence is given metaphorical weight in the final episode. It’s also, simply put, great fun, as Downey can be, in quick succession, amusing, hilarious, disturbing or terrifying, including in a couple of scenes at the end of episode 3 where most of his characters are seated around the same table. You do get the impression, sometimes, that you are going as crazy as our increasingly tormented protagonist.
A last great thing about “The Sympathizer” is how its visuals complement its narrative flourishes and thematic ambition. This includes the editing, which loves, especially in episode 1, to use match cuts to seamlessly transition from one scene to the next and from one temporality to the next, giving great pacing to a narrative that can be at times difficult to follow. Some scenes are made memorable by the camera, including an assassination made even more disturbing when the camera tracks back so as to make visible both the man being brutally killed and his unsuspecting mother having tea on the balcony upstairs – while Independence Day fireworks lighten up the sky.
“The Sympathizer”, in short, is a brilliant series, whose ending will long linger in your mind. That same ending also addresses how difficult ending a story can be, while the Vietnam War, on the other hand, seems like it will never be truly over. Perhaps the “American War” can compete with it and finally challenge its narrative and ideological dominance.
