The Sympathizer Review: A Captivating Look at the Vietnam War, with Multiple Robert Downey Jrs.
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The Pitch: Half French and half Vietnamese, a man known only as The Captain (Hoa Xuande) was always an outsider as a child — and as an adult in the thick of the Vietnam War, he remains trapped between two worlds, because he not only serves as an aide to a South Vietnamese leader called The General (Toan Le), but secretly works as a spy for the North Vietnamese forces on the verge of winning the war. (You might call him a Sympathizer… but to whom?)
When Saigon falls in 1975, The Captain is ordered to accompany The General to the United States as a refugee, continuing his life of subterfuge even while his loyalties grow increasingly tested. It doesn’t help that throughout the series The Captain finds himself aligned with an assortment of American men of various professions (all played by Robert Downey Jr.); all of them are unique characters in their own right, except for what they represent to The Captain — the promise of false help.
Good Morning, Vietnam: While the subject matter is at many points quite heavy, The Sympathizer is a surprisingly lively, engaging limited series that isn’t afraid of finding the humor in certain situations. Showrunners Park Chan-wook (Oldboy) and Don McKellar (The Red Violin) do a masterful job of bringing Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel to the screen, with a dynamic cast led by a breakout performance from Hoa Xuande.
Even the way in which the show plays with the opening HBO logo makes it clear that this show intends to be something different, playing with audience expectations right from the beginning. Prior to release, the most attention-grabbing element of The Sympathizer was that freshly anointed Oscar winner Robert Downey Jr. would be playing multiple characters. Yet what might sound like a gimmick ends up being an essential lynchpin of the story being told here, just one of many meta touches that certainly put some strain on the fourth wall, in compelling and unexpected ways.
Apocalypse Now: One way in which The Sympathizer excels at exploring the Western perspective on Vietnamese culture is Episode 4 of the series, which is focused around the making of a Vietnam War movie called The Hamlet. Every cliche of the genre gets amplified, with guest stars including David Duchovny and John Cho fully committing to the Hollywood parody in action; Duchovny in particular stands out for how far he’s willing to take his character. (It might be the most unlikeable he’s been on screen since 1991’s Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead.)
Yet even the filming of The Hamlet is rooted in The Captain’s perhaps unreliable narration, which drives the narrative’s jumps through time and space. While occasionally, the shifts in time period can be a bit hard to follow, the way in which the series’ past and present are constantly in dialogue creates some profoundly affecting moments. In one episode, two sequences are spliced together — men partying on the eve of battle, and the next day’s bloody combat — with match cuts that unite life and death, breaking our hearts for relative strangers.
The Sympathizer (HBO)
Platoon: As mentioned, Hoa Xuande is extraordinary as The Captain, pushed to so many emotional extremes over the course of the series while remaining a sympathetic anchor for the audience. There’s so much he’s asked to play here — the confident spy, the passionate lover, the rebellious prisoner, the heartbroken son — that it creates legitimate excitement for whatever he does next; it feels like his range as an actor is infinite.
Downey Jr. is The Captain’s most common on-screen ally/adversary, albeit (as mentioned previously) as different characters, from a pop culture-loving CIA agent to a professor with a fetish for Asian culture to a mildly mad filmmaker. Each different role is a different flavor of bonkers, all existing in a heightened reality that might threaten to push the series in an over-the-top direction, yet never crosses the line. Meanwhile, the always wonderful Sandra Oh (a frequent Don McKellar collaborator) stands out as Sofia Mori, whose complicated relationship with The Captain once he arrives stateside is a source of not just comedy and romance, but tragedy and suspense as the story continues.
And nearly everyone from the largely Vietnamese ensemble gets an opportunity to shine, with two of the standouts being Fred Nguyen Khan and Duy Nguyen as The Captain’s lifelong friends Bon and Man — while their individual stories are quite different, the ways in which life and war beat them down register so clearly in their performances.
The Verdict: This review has made multiple references to “the Vietnam War” — but as a title card at the beginning of the series explains, that’s what Americans call it. In Vietnam, it’s known as “the American War.”
That’s not a mind-blowing revelation, but it still sets the perfect tone for what’s to come: Vietnamese is spoken throughout the series (no Hunt for Red October cheating here). Vietnamese music is heavily featured on the soundtrack, along with pop hits of the mid-20th century. And the show’s depiction of what it was like to leave Saigon just before the end of the war is some of the year’s most harrowing, captivating television. It’s truly transportive television, the kind of show that really does open your eyes to a new perspective on the world — and keeps you surprised the entire time.
Where to Watch: The Sympathizer premieres Sunday, April 14th on HBO and Max.
Trailer:
The Sympathizer Review: A Captivating Look at the Vietnam War, with Multiple Robert Downey Jrs.
Liz Shannon Miller
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