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How HBO’s “The Sympathizer” Accomplished its Mission
It may not be loyal to one genre, but it is committed to its cause.
Karl R. De Mesa
2024-04-16T16:54:24.000Z
I’ve only been to Vietnam once. But experiencing Ho Chi Minh City and then reading about the good old, bad old days leading up to the Fall of Saigon in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel was an eye opener.
Set in the 1970s, the book is an espionage thriller and a historical satire that’s full of internal confrontations and frictions. In plot terms, “The Sympathizer” is about the Captain, an army man on active duty in the democratic Southern Vietnamese Army. Born half-Viet and half-French, he was brought up by his poor Vietnamese mother in the countryside, bullied and ostracized for his blue-grey eyes and Eurasian features. Eventually, the Captain (our unreliable narrator in both book and series), attends university in America but eventually returns to Vietnam.
The clincher? The Captain may be stationed as a high-ranking official of the nationalist’s military but he’s really a double agent, undercover fighting for the Viet Cong’s cause. His duty is to spy on the movements of the southies through his close relationship to the General. Eventually, when Saigon falls and the northerners win, he too moves to the USA as a refugee while still continuing to report to his Communist masters back home.
For the kind of book that it is, its unnamed hero (The Captain) is such a complex character, not just because he’s an undercover agent but also because he’s a moral man faced with only immoral decisions. “I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces. Perhaps not surprisingly, I am also a man of two minds.” This is how the novel begins and is also how the series starts—as a forced confession from the Captain imprisoned in a Viet Cong cell.
Watching the series, what first struck me was how aptly the atmosphere and tone are executed. Saigon is the Paris of South East Asia, still just shaking off the chains of French colonialism but about to dive head long into ruin. The Captain and the characters around him make for such surreal scenes they can’t help but be ridiculous as well as bizarre.
Three secret ingredients make the whole unlikely soup work, really. Series head director Park Chan-wook (he of “Oldboy” and “Decision to Leave” fame), the underrated young Aussie-Vietnamese actor Hoa Xuande playing the Captain, and Oscar-winner Robert Downey Jr. who plays four different characters.
So many scenes from the book are visualized into the absurd theater that espionage can easily turn into, like the Captain recalling how, as a teen, he turned to a freshly prepped squid to sate his lust.
In another scene straight out of the novel’s pages, the Captain becomes the cultural expert in a movie about the Vietnam War (a clear reference to Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now”) and is called on to check on the veracity of a manufactured Vietnamese “hamlet” the production had built at a Los Angeles outdoor setting.
Upon seeing how well and how accurate the little village was made, the Captain is almost brought to tears. “I can almost smell my mother’s fish cooking,” he thanks set designer says with a voice thick in homesickness.
That he got nostalgic from such a planned piece of artifice is the undertone running through it all. Chan-wook and his co-directors lens the episodes with a genuinely emotive nudge to the immigrant’s constant yearning for a home he knows he can never really call home ever again.
Hoa Xuande’s a relatively unknown newcomer—his last starring role was in the underrated Australian series “Last King of the Cross”—but as the Captain here he pretty gamely knocks it out of the park. He felt like he’d “won the lottery” he said in an interview with Vanity Fair when he was cast in the lead the role, and he sure pits forth an argument for stepping up to the plate, playing our conflicted hero with wryness and grace.
In one of the later episodes, when he dons a blonde wig as a disguise to assassinate a fellow Vietnamese émigré (so he can allay suspicion away from him as a potential mole), the irony of his half-breed looks and how he’s playing into the stereotype aren’t lost on him. “All bastards are traitors,” his bullies claimed. He weep-laughs at how he’s just fulfilled this insult.
Other notable performances include Sandra Oh, as Japanese academic Sofia Mori, who eventually dates the Captain, stealing almost every scene she’s in with Mrs. Robinson flair.
Then of course there’s four (yeah, count them four) Robert Downey Juniors with each iteration of the white devil, “Tay Balo” in Vietnamese slang, more outlandish-looking than the last. That they’re all needy man-boys, transactional and capitalistic, and yet somehow come off still nuanced is a testament to RDJ’s fresh Oscar win as continual validation.
RDJ’s four roles ably represents the defective Pax Americana established by its humiliating loss in the Vietnam War. He never shies away from depicting any of them with the kind of zest he brought to, say “Tropic Thunder’s” method actor Kirk Lazarus who famously quipped about reigning in thespian eagerness: “You never go full retard!” Great advice. And RDJ took this to heart here, too. As a drama series “The Sympathizer” looks back at the catastrophe of America’s loss in Vietnam through many different lenses, but mostly it examines how politics can be deeply, traumatically personal; expressed as a love story, writ as a tale of broken friendships, and above all an overarching search for identity whether as émigré or immigrant.
Because it’s couched as a black comedy, it’s hella hilarious as well. Made my binge worth it.
HBO’s “The Sympathizer” is now available to stream on MAX
Set in the 1970s, the book is an espionage thriller and a historical satire that’s full of internal confrontations and frictions. In plot terms, “The Sympathizer” is about the Captain, an army man on active duty in the democratic Southern Vietnamese Army. Born half-Viet and half-French, he was brought up by his poor Vietnamese mother in the countryside, bullied and ostracized for his blue-grey eyes and Eurasian features. Eventually, the Captain (our unreliable narrator in both book and series), attends university in America but eventually returns to Vietnam.
The clincher? The Captain may be stationed as a high-ranking official of the nationalist’s military but he’s really a double agent, undercover fighting for the Viet Cong’s cause. His duty is to spy on the movements of the southies through his close relationship to the General. Eventually, when Saigon falls and the northerners win, he too moves to the USA as a refugee while still continuing to report to his Communist masters back home.
For the kind of book that it is, its unnamed hero (The Captain) is such a complex character, not just because he’s an undercover agent but also because he’s a moral man faced with only immoral decisions. “I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces. Perhaps not surprisingly, I am also a man of two minds.” This is how the novel begins and is also how the series starts—as a forced confession from the Captain imprisoned in a Viet Cong cell.
Watching the series, what first struck me was how aptly the atmosphere and tone are executed. Saigon is the Paris of South East Asia, still just shaking off the chains of French colonialism but about to dive head long into ruin. The Captain and the characters around him make for such surreal scenes they can’t help but be ridiculous as well as bizarre.
Three secret ingredients make the whole unlikely soup work, really. Series head director Park Chan-wook (he of “Oldboy” and “Decision to Leave” fame), the underrated young Aussie-Vietnamese actor Hoa Xuande playing the Captain, and Oscar-winner Robert Downey Jr. who plays four different characters.
So many scenes from the book are visualized into the absurd theater that espionage can easily turn into, like the Captain recalling how, as a teen, he turned to a freshly prepped squid to sate his lust.
In another scene straight out of the novel’s pages, the Captain becomes the cultural expert in a movie about the Vietnam War (a clear reference to Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now”) and is called on to check on the veracity of a manufactured Vietnamese “hamlet” the production had built at a Los Angeles outdoor setting.
Upon seeing how well and how accurate the little village was made, the Captain is almost brought to tears. “I can almost smell my mother’s fish cooking,” he thanks set designer says with a voice thick in homesickness.
That he got nostalgic from such a planned piece of artifice is the undertone running through it all. Chan-wook and his co-directors lens the episodes with a genuinely emotive nudge to the immigrant’s constant yearning for a home he knows he can never really call home ever again.
Hoa Xuande’s a relatively unknown newcomer—his last starring role was in the underrated Australian series “Last King of the Cross”—but as the Captain here he pretty gamely knocks it out of the park. He felt like he’d “won the lottery” he said in an interview with Vanity Fair when he was cast in the lead the role, and he sure pits forth an argument for stepping up to the plate, playing our conflicted hero with wryness and grace.
In one of the later episodes, when he dons a blonde wig as a disguise to assassinate a fellow Vietnamese émigré (so he can allay suspicion away from him as a potential mole), the irony of his half-breed looks and how he’s playing into the stereotype aren’t lost on him. “All bastards are traitors,” his bullies claimed. He weep-laughs at how he’s just fulfilled this insult.
Other notable performances include Sandra Oh, as Japanese academic Sofia Mori, who eventually dates the Captain, stealing almost every scene she’s in with Mrs. Robinson flair.
Then of course there’s four (yeah, count them four) Robert Downey Juniors with each iteration of the white devil, “Tay Balo” in Vietnamese slang, more outlandish-looking than the last. That they’re all needy man-boys, transactional and capitalistic, and yet somehow come off still nuanced is a testament to RDJ’s fresh Oscar win as continual validation.
RDJ’s four roles ably represents the defective Pax Americana established by its humiliating loss in the Vietnam War. He never shies away from depicting any of them with the kind of zest he brought to, say “Tropic Thunder’s” method actor Kirk Lazarus who famously quipped about reigning in thespian eagerness: “You never go full retard!” Great advice. And RDJ took this to heart here, too. As a drama series “The Sympathizer” looks back at the catastrophe of America’s loss in Vietnam through many different lenses, but mostly it examines how politics can be deeply, traumatically personal; expressed as a love story, writ as a tale of broken friendships, and above all an overarching search for identity whether as émigré or immigrant.
Because it’s couched as a black comedy, it’s hella hilarious as well. Made my binge worth it.
HBO’s “The Sympathizer” is now available to stream on MAX
