'The Sympathizer' Turns a Bestseller Adaptation Into a TV Tour de Force (2024)

In the opening seconds of HBO‘s adaptation of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s bestselling novel The Sympathizer, the pay cable giant’s familiar logo is transformed so that, instead of evoking a television set turning on, it becomes part of a reel of 8mm film. The miniseries, about a North Vietnamese double agent (Hoa Xuande) in the mid-Seventies, is filled with the sights and sounds of movies being played for an audience. Sometimes, it’s within the action, like how an interrogation by South Vietnamese police of a Viet Cong spy happens onstage at a Saigon movie palace, the projector aiming a glaring light at the suspect, while cops in the theater seats comment on the action like it’s a film they’re watching. Sometimes, it’s a stylistic device, where we hear the sounds of the reel rewinding or fast-forwarding when the story takes an abrupt chronological turn.

The middle chapter of the seven-episode saga even devotes itself to the production of a fictional movie about the Vietnam War, The Hamlet, where our protagonist, known only as the Captain, works as a technical adviser. His goal is to humanize the Vietnamese characters as much as possible, starting with a task whose necessity is embarrassing: He has to persuade the film’s director, Nicos (freshly-minuted Oscar winner Robert Downey Jr.), to actually give those characters some dialogue. Any dialogue.

When a Vietnamese colleague of the Captain’s gets a look at The Hamlet, he deems it trash, but admits that if you’re looking at it from an American perspective, “it’s pretty progressive.” If The Sympathizer — primarily directed by the great South Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook (Decision to Leave), who adapted the book with Don McKellar — isn’t an exact funhouse mirror image of its movie-within-the-show, it’s close. Nearly all the characters are Vietnamese, and each are given complexity and interior life. With the exception of David Duchovny as The Hamlet‘s overly-Method star, the few white characters of note are all cartoons played by Downey.

The story is presented as the Captain’s confession to the commander of a North Vietnamese reeducation camp, looking back on his time undercover as a South Vietnamese secret policeman; his stint in America after the fall of Saigon, sent by his handlers to keep an eye on the General (Toan Le); and the eventual return to southeast Asia that lands him in the camp, atoning for his many sins. And even within that framework, The Sympathizer giddily careens through time, sometimes because the Captain’s attention has wandered, sometimes because his interrogator wants more context.

This Russian-nesting-doll approach, hiding pieces of the narrative inside other pieces, could easily get confusing. But it never does, for a few reasons.

The first is that Chan-wook and McKellar have not abandoned the sense of humor that won the book the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. They never once attempt to ignore or diminish the tragedies of a nation split in two, hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of deaths, families being separated, refugees forever feeling displaced, and more. Yet even with all of that as its foundation, this is a very, very darkly funny show. The Captain and his allies — both the real Communist ones and the capitalists he pretends to be working for — are frequently depicted as bumblers who are lucky to have accomplished anything. In an early scene, the Captain is assigned the task of choosing which Secret Police officers will be allowed on the General’s plane to America before Saigon falls, and how many family members will be allowed to accompany each of them. When one man threatens suicide if he’s not allotted more seats, the Captain offers him a gun and steps out of the room to give him privacy; after a few moments’ thought, the guy leaves the pistol alone and instead steals all the candy from the Captain’s desk.

The various powerful white men the Captain meets — cigar-chomping CIA agent Claude (Downey with thinning curly hair and a lot of sun damage), hypocritical “Oriental studies” teacher Professor Hammer (Downey bald and pot-bellied), military vet-turned-politician “Napalm” Ned (Downey under a ton of bronzer, with a deliberately plastered-on toupee), and Nicos (the closest we get to Downey looking like a Seventies version of himself) — are all fundamentally ridiculous in multiple ways(*). And even sequences where the Captain and/or his best friend Bon (Fred Nguyen Khan) have to kill people are presented at least as much as slapstick as they are as horror. The sense of humor provides a welcome counterweight to the serious nature of the material, and also helps keep the fractured timeline clear, because the constant digressions and reversals are a running gag in and of themselves, worth paying attention to at all times.

(*) Downey, who’s also an executive producer, is clearly having a ball donning all these wigs and prosthetics, and trying on various affectations. For the most part, the larger-than-life performances work well, and suggest a different timeline where he managed to stick around as an SNL castmember for more than just that disastrous single season in the mid-Eighties. But Professor Hammer, in addition to being a classic fake champion of minorities who’s actually more racist than everyone else, is such a caricatured sissy that it feels off-putting, and not necessarily for the reasons he or director Park might have intended. There are also a few scenes where Claude disguises himself as a flamboyant gay man to have clandestine meetings with the Captain, and viewers should not be blamed if they grow confused over which RDJ they’re watching at the moment. (Whereas if the professor was just a fake identity of Claude’s, the contemptuous, hyper-effeminate nature of him would play better.) Also, it’s something of an inside joke that, 16 years after Tropic Thunder, Downey is now playing the director of a terrible fake Vietnam movie, rather than donning blackface to play the star of one.

The contortions of the plot also work because Park is such an arresting and inventive visual storyteller. With his last TV project, the AMC miniseries The Little Drummer Girl(*), he toggled between classical Hollywood filmmaking and a rawer and more verité approach, each looking stunning in its own way. Here, he and the directors who follow him (Fernando Meirelles, who just did Apple’s Sugar, and English director Marc Munden) take an everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach to things. Beyond the recurring movie projector motif, there’s the way that images from difference pieces of the Captain’s story bleed together even when he’s not skipping around in time. Sometimes, sequences are shot to look as realistic as possible. Other times, they deliberately look phony, to help illustrate the many lies the Captain is telling, and the many ways Hollywood has gotten the subject of Vietnam so wrong. And occasionally, it just looks jaw-dropping, like a sequence where the bus to the General’s plane has to maneuver around North Vietnamese artillery shells, the explosions increasing until it looks like the Captain and Bon are racing into Hell itself. No idea is deemed too strange, yet it rarely seems self-indulgent.

(*) Interestingly, that’s also a espionage story frequently presented in filmmaking terms, like when Florence Pugh’s handler tells her, “I am the producer, writer, and director of our little show.”

Mainly, though, it’s easy and interesting to follow because Hoa Xuande is so good in the lead role. Perhaps befitting a man who’s referred to only by his title, the Captain is perpetually at risk of seeming more like a symbol than a person. Born to a doting Vietnamese mother and an absent French father, he grew up ostracized as a half-breed, even though his mother kept telling him that he wasn’t half of anything, but twice of everything. (“Twice-of-Everything” becomes Bon’s sarcastic but affectionate nickname for him.) Other characters are constantly trying to identify which parts of the Captain are informed by which of his parents, as if it’s not just Professor Hammer who refuses to see him as anything but an avatar of two cultures struggling to co-exist(*).

(*) The one character who largely doesn’t view him that way is his sometime-girlfriend Sofia Mori, played by Sandra Oh. And even her feelings on the subject are driven by larger questions about assimilation, since she’s of Japanese ancestry but born in America, and thinks of herself first and foremost as a Californian.

But if the character is at times written as a walking thesis statement, Xuande plays him with just the right mix of wry humor and vulnerability. To everyone else, the Captain is an abstraction. But as far as he’s concerned, this inability to feel at home anywhere — not Vietnamese enough in Saigon, not white enough in America, a man lying to his best friend but while also no longer thinking or acting like his true colleagues from Hanoi — is a real, painful thing he can never get away from. Xuande, an Australian actor who hasn’t done much American work prior to this, commands the screen, finds ways to signal with his face all the things the Captain can’t allow himself to say aloud, and holds this whole weird story together. He’s great.

Even with that performance, those visuals, and that sense of humor, there are occasions — particularly in the finale, which largely takes place at the reeducation camp — where The Sympathizer, like its hero, gets too lost in its own head. More often than not, though, it works very well, despite the high degree of difficulty that would come with any adaptation of the book.

While The Hamlet is being filmed, the South Vietnamese extras object to reciting any of the pro-Communist dialogue the Captain has given to their Viet Cong characters. The Captain, struggling to appease Nicos, while also sneaking in some subversive rhetoric that’s favorable to his side of this struggle, tries appealing to the refugees’ better natures. “Why do we make art,” he asks them, “if not to explore the full complexity of life, to plumb the depths, to unearth the hidden truth, to see a thing from all sides?”

The extras are unconvinced by his speech. But The Sympathizer itself lives up to that idea, offering the full complexity of life, and the hidden truth of all sides, in a way that The Hamlet tries and so comically fails to do.

The first episode of The Sympathizer debuts April 14 on HBO and Max, with additional episodes releasing weekly. I’ve seen all seven episodes.