Stylized and sophisticated, HBO’s new limited series The Sympathizer is old-fashioned appointment viewing at its best. With director Park Chan-wook’s (Decision to Leave, The Handmaiden, Oldboy) gift for blending and bending genre, his fusion of eye-popping movie aesthetics with intricate storytelling translates well to the small screen. Adapted from Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer-winning 2015 novel of the same name, Park and series co-creator Don McKellar cleverly synthesize their artistic sensibilities to revel in the source material’s intricacies.
Set during the post-Vietnam war era, the story is narrated by an unnamed protagonist known only as The Captain (Hoa Xuande). He is a spy, a double agent, a man of two faces caught between races and cultures. Half-Vietnamese and half-French, he was educated in the United States. He is staunchly loyal to his country of birth, a communist appearing to work for the CIA who is secretly striving towards an independent Vietnam. On the other hand, he is also charmed by America and its culture. He loves the music and the movies and even gets sucked into the lifestyle when he is ordered to move there in order to continue his mission.
Park (who directs three of the seven episodes) is an expert at mining dualities and duplicities. His complex vision artfully and effortlessly shifts between comedy and brutality. McKellar shares a love of black humour, satire, and the desire to dissect humanity’s foibles. In this partnership, their shared love of the absurd, together with their empathetic but clear-eyed view of humanity produces a potent mix.
The key narrative device is portraying The Captain as an unreliable narrator, a traditional literary and film noir movie convention. He is telling the story as a memory, under duress, a strategy that is frequently suspicious. The mind plays tricks on you. Details and the order of how they occurred are often misremembered. The Sympathizer employs an ingenious tactic whereby it is constantly rewriting, revising, and even rewinding to either enormously comic or extremely tragic effect, depending on the event. It’s an entertaining meta device that is skillfully used in the service of the show’s underlying themes.
As a result of this narration, the viewer sees and experiences everything through The Captain’s eyes. This includes characters and it affects the way they are represented. In the South Vietnamese Army, The Captain served directly under The General (Toan Le). When they are evacuated by the CIA, along with members of that inner circle, they form a community in Oklahoma. The General still dreams of launching an attack to reclaim their homeland from the Communists and keeps it alive with these new immigrants’ help. They are all caricatures to a degree but none more so than the General himself. Despite his position, he’s not very clever, smelling a rat even as his so-called loyal servant, The Captain, is actually manipulating things around him with the help of high-ranking CIA agent Claude.
Yet, perhaps the most problematic series of characters – or caricatures, rather – are the white male authority figures who hold power over The Captain. It’s not just Claude but also The Captain’s American employer and former mentor at the University, a U.S. senator who is sympathetic to their cause, and an Academy Award filmmaker who hires The Captain as an advisor for his next project, a massive retelling (and American hijacking) of the Vietnam War story.
The issue is that they are all played by one actor, Robert Downey Jr. This is, in theory, a clever scheme and suits the story in terms of its themes of dualities. His characters range from macho to effeminate to right-wing to egomaniacal – but their representation in the story is minor despite their power. Because of structural narrative constraints, their qualities can only be sketchily presented. Downey Jr. is not able to show enough range to take them past type and so this trick wears thin and even gets a bit irritating after a while.
It’s too bad since the acting is superb all around, even when the parts are small. Xuande as The Captain is the only one whose part demands any range but portrays it quite brilliantly, giving his performance a profound and wide-ranging depth. As much as this series ramps up the action, the emotions, the extensive exposés at the heart of his identity, this performer keeps up. He’s quite outstanding.
Other supporting characters are equally terrific. The always wonderful Sandra Oh delivers again as a university secretary who is frustrated by her boss’ racism and unearned authority. But it’s David Duchovny who stands out with a scary-hilarious turn as a psychotic actor whose method acting goes terribly wrong in a film that can only be described as Apocalypse Now meets Last Tango In Paris.
The Sympathizer does a masterful job of reconsidering America’s representation of the Vietnam War and of the power dynamics involved. In this show, the power to tell the story is reclaimed. Thanks to Park and McKellar, this becomes distinctly filtered through the banner of identity. All the characters, even the caricatures, are used as a means to explore its multifarious nature. At any given time, there are overlapping impulses, all stemming from personal, cultural, political, and national loyalties.
The co-creators deftly illustrate how these can be contradictory and can even co-exist within an individual, especially a biracial immigrant. The same can be said for the other refugees and their stories. What makes the show so successful and resonant are all the ways that these two manage such an extensive excavation of identity’s many facets by filtering their explorations through the lens of absurdity. Riffing off of movie conventions, popular culture and nostalgia makes it all so piercingly clear.
The Sympathizer is not simply a spy thriller: it is part political treatise and part biting satire, a neo noir teeming with 70s nostalgia. No one can fashion such a complicated blend better than Park. There are so many references and reflections that trying to keep track is enough to make a film geek’s head explode and in the best way. Anyone with a knowledge of Park’s film, especially Oldboy, will get a particular kick out of this series, but anyone can simply sit back and enjoy this crazy roller coaster ride. It’ll hit you one way or the other.
New episodes of The Sympathizer air Sundays at 9 PM EST exclusively on Crave.
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