Sometimes, a mini-series adaptation of a celebrated novel ultimately best serves as an advertisement for that book. Such is the case with The Sympathizer, an HBO adaptation of the Pulitzer-winning novel by Viet Thanh Nguyen, which debuts on Sunday. The series, co-created by the inventive Korean director Park Chan-wook, has many merits. But as the show reaches its conclusion, one gets the sense that the story’s epic heft is probably best felt in prose form. The Sympathizer is a tale of identity careening across history that may require more interior monologue than is generally permissible on television.
That said, the series (HBO, April 14) is fascinating. The Sympathizer is a strange and vital counterpoint to the many Western-centric accounts of the Vietnam War (which, the series is careful to remind us, is called the American War by the Vietnamese) that have cluttered culture for decades. Nguyen seeks to broaden and complicate Western perception of the conflict and its fallout, to assert the agency, the ache, the confusion of people long depicted as animalistic aggressors or hapless victims. The Sympathizer is a Pollock painting of varied moral hues—the story has little interest in the absolute values of good and bad.
Hoa Xuande plays the Captain, a handsome and competent young man working for the South Vietnamese secret police. He is well ensconced and respected in that life, serving as the trusty right hand of his superior, the General (Toan Le). The Captain has two childhood best friends, slightly oafish Bon (Fred Nguyen Khan) and slim, slippery Man (Duy Nguyễn). They are brothers by blood oath, having tied their fates together as children. Bon is loyal to the General and his campaign, while the Captain, under the guidance of Man, is working as a double agent, relaying information to comrades in the north as their forces approach Saigon in the lunatic end-days of the war, in 1975.
An offbeat espionage narrative gives way to chummy brothers-in-arms bonding, which then gives way to a harrowing escape from Saigon, in which tragedy occurs and the mettle of the Captain’s commitment to the cause is first tested. From there, The Sympathizer scatters into a discordant picaresque. The Captain winds up in LA, still in the close company of Bon and the General, while also exploring the peculiar facets of life in America. He’s no stranger to the country, having studied there as a university student and fluently learning both its language and accent, but this trip, if you can call it that, is decidedly more charged and precarious.
The tension of the series comes in several forms. There is first the matter of the Captain’s torn allegiances. The mixed-race son of a Vietnamese mother and a French father, the Captain has perhaps always felt stuck between worlds. Which might make him the best candidate for the kind of clandestine work he’s been assigned, its demand for intricate and contradictory allegiances. He’s alarmingly adept at it, but the juggling act is clearly wearing on him. As his memory of one life (and, perhaps, his loyalty to it) fades in the glare of a new one, the Captain may be losing his way.
There is also the specific matter of the Captain’s double mission, which plays out with the deceptive smallness of a Graham Greene spy story. What might seem local, even petty is gradually revealed to be something significant. Liquor store back rooms and sparse apartments serve as incubators for actual revolutionary thought and action. Though the series is often shaggy and seriocomic, jolts of meaningful violence remind us of the real stakes of the Captain’s pursuit to fulfill an uneasy duty.
Park binds this all together loosely. The imbalance of the series, as it teeters between satire and thriller, personal drama and wry survey of cultural and political rot, seems deliberate. We are constantly kept on our toes, never sure where any given episode is headed. The Captain glimpses the insidious pretensions of academia (where he meets a peppery love interest sharply played by Sandra Oh). He is confronted by the reckless posturing of Hollywood (he works as a consultant on an Apocalypse Now-esque film). He observes the quotidian struggles of immigration and assimilation. Wafting around all this is the mournful call of the homeland, a place both bitterly remembered and longed for. The Sympathizer depicts people aching to reconnect with their history, to undo their displacement, to realign a trajectory blown off course by calamity. But also, maybe, they just want to move on with their lives.
A deep sadness blooms from those warring impulses, though the show’s gripping pathos is sometimes undermined by its bursts of puckish, sideways humor. Robert Downey, Jr. plays multiple characters—essentially all the powerful white men whom the Captain encounters on his adventure, ranging from a calculating CIA spook to a swishy professor with a noxious Asian fetish. Some of these guys are more credibly realized than others. The point being made is clear, that all these men of colonial power blur into one aggregate figure of opportunism and predation. But, at times, Downey, Jr. makes too much of a joke of that argument.
Also hampering matters is the finale episode, which devolves into hallucinatory abstraction that creates too much distortion just when all this chaos ought to be coalescing into epiphany, or catharsis. The jaggedness of the show’s arc often works to its benefit, but I longed for a smoother, more affecting end.
Those are relatively small complaints about what is otherwise an invigoratingly lively, challenging series. In trying to capture the sprawling temper of an ailing community in a fractured era, The Sympathizer may not quite live up to its literary predecessor. But it is television worth seeking out and contending with. It demands attention and care, forcing the viewer to sit forward to better interpret Nguyen and Park’s distinctive narrative grammar, to truly engage with this reconsideration of a terrible epoch. The Sympathizer allows the people in all those war photographs and news reels, the extras in the backgrounds of countless movies, to step into the foreground in all their heartsick, furious, idiosyncratic dimension. When they speak, we are more than compelled to listen.
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