The gimmick to draw
viewers to HBO’s brilliant new comedy-drama The Sympathizer is
admittedly a brilliant one. Not only does it have Robert Downey Jr appearing in
his first TV role since his incredible one season stint on Ally McBeal nearly
a quarter of a century, it shows him in four different roles as if one
Downey character wasn’t enough to make us watch.
As I mentioned in
my review of Lessons in Chemistry, I’ve frequently thought that one of
the sins of the MCU is that it robbed us of the work of some of the most
talented actors in history to iconic comic book characters. Few of the losses
were more intense than Downey’s. You can’t say it didn’t work out for him.
Downey’s tenure as Tony Stark not only solidified a comeback for an actor who
for the first twenty years of his career – as he himself said in acceptance
speech at the Oscars - was constantly
having trouble getting insured and staying out of jail. The risk not only paid
off for Downey but for the Marvel Cinematic Universe – though I’d argue the
existence of the latter was far more harmful to cinema and much of TV. Downey
is so synonymous with Tony Stark that in the last fifteen years he’s had few
opportunities to do any major films or TV outside of it. It wasn’t until his
character finally sacrificed himself in Endgame that he was free to do
other things. Critics and audiences got a very clear picture of that in his
incredible performance as Levi Strauss, the antagonist at the center of the Oscar-winning
– and box office record breaking – Oppenheimer. One of the many pleasures
of watching it make its way to the Best Picture this year was getting to see
Downey finally receive the Oscar for one of his greatest works.
Now there is an excellent
chance, that with the work he is doing in The Sympathizer, he will
become the first male actor to win an Oscar and an Emmy in the same year.
Downey now takes on a task that few before could master as he plays four
completely different American characters in The Sympathizer. I’ve only
seen the first two in the first two episodes: Carl, a CIA man who is on the
side of a North Vietnamese general in the fall of Saigon and an LA academic who
says all the right things about being politically correct in public and private
while he infantilizes Asians at the same time. Downey will also be playing a
director and a politician in later episodes – and a teaser indicates all four
characters will at one point be onscreen at the same time.
This is hallowed ground
played by such masters as Peter Sellers and Alec Guiness as well as Eddie
Murphy in multiple films. What’s striking in the early episodes is, given the
chance to chew the scenery, something Downey himself knows he’s known for (and
doesn’t always consider it a compliment) he doesn’t make it particularly
obvious in the episodes I’ve seen. Perhaps it is the nature of the characters:
Carl is the CIA man and he has to move through the shadows more than ever and
the professor doesn’t want to obviously make himself the center of attention
(though it’s clear at an academic function he doesn’t like it when that
happens) But there might be a subtler reason: Downey knows that while he is
there for the entertainment purposes and probably the draw, he doesn’t want to
take attention away from the main story.
And the thing is,
he has a point. I might not have tuned into The Sympathizer were it not
for Downey’s presence. But after just two episodes, I think it could stand on
its own with Downey less of a factor. To be sure I seriously doubt this series
could have gotten greenlit even on HBO without Downey’s involvement. His
production company is responsible for it. But this is not an easy story to tell
even though its very clear we need it told.
Like many limited
series adaptions I hadn’t read Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel
and I’m not sure I would have sought it out voluntarily. The Vietnam War was a
tired trope when I was a teenager and I didn’t know if there was anything new
that could be milked from it. I clearly underestimated the novel and the story
Nguyen is telling.
The story is being
related in a confessional from a character we know only as the Captain (Hoa
Xaunde). It is framed as a confessional being told from a reeducation camp by
the Captain which he has apparently told many times before and in fact keeps
retelling it as we hear it. The Captain is of a Vietnamese mother and a French
father, which makes him bi-racial and bi-lingual. He also received an American
education and when he returned to North Vietnam all of these capacities have made him a
trusted aide to a delusional General, who at the start of the series is ‘the
most feared man in the North and by some
in the South.’ What no one knows at the
start of the series is that the Captain is a double agent, working for the
South Vietnamese government. We see him in a cinema at first with the general
and Carl, who is the general’s closest aide, watching a spy be tortured for a
list of critical names in his office. They are demanding she give up her contact
which makes the Captain nervous – because he’s the one who not only gave them
to her but arrested her in the first place.
The Sympathizer begins with the
war practically lost – Saigon is about to fall before the first episode is even
half over. And it is here that the episode plays what is its greatest trick.
Because for all the films and TV shows we’ve seen about ‘The War’, almost none of them dare to look at it from
the perspective of the Vietnamese.
I have little
doubt this was at least one of the intentions off the original novel of Nguyen
to lay bare that, for all America’s arguing that Vietnam was a wound on the
psyche we’ve never recovered from, it had everything to do with us and nothing
to do with Vietnam. The General himself states it in the first episode: “They
liked playing cowboys against Communism for a few years and now that they’ve
gotten bored, they’re leaving.” I
imagine many leftists will be glad to hear this said in the series – but they’ll
be far less happy when the Captain gets to America and right into the housing
of 70s academia, the heart of the student protest movement. In the scenes where
Downey plays the Captain’s former educator, he plays on several single
infantilizing cliché the left is guilty of. He talks to his half Japanese secretary
as if she doesn’t know the ‘right way of being Japanese’, tells the Captain “there’s
nothing wrong with the word Oriental’, dresses him in a peasant jacket for a
party and gives him a homework
assignment asking him to explain the difference between his ‘Oriental and Occidental
side’. The part that really hit home is when a student interviews the captain
and assures him: “We were all on your side, you know.” The Captain benignly
asks: “Which side was that? How do you know I’m not a Viet Cong?” The student
freezes before the Captain jokes and assures him that he’s one of the good
ones.
I’ve been watching
movies and TV about the Vietnam War my whole life. It is not until I saw The
Sympathizer that I realized not only what I was missing but the whole
divide between the left and right on every issue. Thousands of students marched in the street
to protest the war and were willing to burn draft cards. I don’t remember any
marchers chanting “Hey-Hey-Hey LBJ, how many Vietnamese did you kill today?” The Sympathizer makes it clear that
Vietnam might as well have been Argentina or Nigeria for all the real
importance it meant to either extreme. It was about Americans dying in a
meaningless war. The Vietnamese who got killed were just details and that was
true to both sides. If you can’t see the parallels to our conflicts in the
Middle East over the first twenty years of this century, you’re clearly not
looking that hard.
The Sympathizer is adapted by two undervalued
peers of the film industry. Park Chan-Wook is one of the great filmmakers of
South Korea, best known for Oldboy and Don McKellar, an actor, writer
and director for independent films, such as 32 short films about Glenn
Gould, The Red Violin and one of my personal favorites Last Night, the
most optimistic film I’ve ever seen about the world ending in history. I think
McKellar’s tone is the more dominant one in The Sympathizer mainly because
he has always been more of an experimental filmmaker and so much of the first
two episodes take on the idea of experimental. We are constantly rewinding back
to earlier points in the story as The Captain remembers pieces he’s left out before
and then goes back to earlier places that came later, all of which unfold like
a tape rewinding. It’s clear with the opening itself. The logo of HBO comes up
but then we enter it like it is the lens of a camera and it follows the level
of a filmstrip. In part this is clear as to how the Captain tells his story.
When he learns that he is about to be sent to America, he said that he planned
on telling off the general in a style that was pure Hollywood. He constantly
talks of westerns, there are trick shots that evoke war movies and when he has
sex we are given an image that is purely out of the kind of pornography of the
era.
The Sympathizer can vary from
intense comedy to dark violence very quickly and never is this more clear than
at the fall of Saigon itself. The General has insisted on riding through Saigon
(momentarily retreating) on a motorcycle in dress uniform with a military guard.
When he gets to the hangar and the rockets are falling, he’s infuriated that he
and his family don’t get their own seats. But as the bus they are in rides down
to the runway, it dodges the falling rockets – until it can’t. The Captain and
his friend and his young wife and child run for the safety of the plane – but a
missile hits them and Boa’s wife dies. The Captain pleads for Boa to run with
him – and it’s not until the next episode’s end we learn that not only his wife
but infant son died.
The episode takes
a similar run to insanity involving the General in America. He dresses in full
uniform in a refugee camp, expecting to be greeting with honors by ‘his people’.
When they throw food and try to grab him, he is shocked and is certain that
there is a spy among them. The General’s delusions are ludicrous: by the time
he buys a liquor store and sees that a painting has been drawn to resemble the
famous photo, he is convinced it is black ops work when as the Captain tells
him: “It’s probably just a racist.” He then has a meeting of old followers in
this liquor story with the certainty that he will return to power and demands
the spy be found and killed. All of this would be utterly hysterical except
everyone’s taking it dead seriously – especially the Captain.
While back in LA, the
Captain begins an affair with the professor’s much older Japanese-American secretary.
Sandra Oh is nearly as great a draw to the proceedings as Downey, as she adds
yet another brilliant character role to her ensemble since her departure from Grey’s
Anatomy. I may draw wrath from Shondaland for saying this, but I always
thought Oh’s talent was wasted in that show and its been clear in the roles she’s
taken since leaving it as to just what we’ve lost. From the seduction dance she
had to do in the title role in Killing Eve to her undervalued work in
the Netflix comedy The Chair Oh has shown depths she never got to as
Christina Yang. Like everyone else she seems to have the Captain’s number at
time: she knows that he’s playing a role as the ‘Good Little Asian’ but she doesn’t care enough. The Captain seems
attached to her but she makes it very clear “the only kind of love I believe in
is free love.” Later episodes promise other cameos from David Duchovny as a temperamental
director and John Cho as an Asian actor
who dies in every movie.
There is also a
very valid reason to doubt the Captain as a reliable narrator. He has been an
outsider all his life, part of many worlds, belonging to none. We’ve been told that
this is the latest statement he’s given to his captors, which just means that
he may be leaving out – or putting in – more this time then the next one. As
someone who has spent the last five years enjoying shows where I never was quite
sure to trust the reality of what I was seeing – from Atlanta to Barry
to Fargo - I’m inclined to
find that a strength, not a flaw.
As HBO enters its
new corporate leadership as well as the end of so many flagship programs the
last few years, many have doubted whether it will be the same network it was. I
confess I’ve had some doubts myself given the most recent overblow limited
series so far this year: I was not a fan of either Night Country or The
Regime. I’m also not waiting for Euphoria to return and I’m not
particularly sad that Curb Your Enthusiasm is finally over. But that
doesn’t mean that there still isn’t good stuff out there: The Gilded Age looks
certain to contend for Emmys this year and The Last of Us seems to be
everything you could hope for. Comedy has always been more slipshod but I look
forward to the return of Hacks next week and Somebody Somewhere down
the road. The problem has been limited series, once one of the networks
strengths: given the quality of the two we’ve had so far in 2024, I was
beginning to think they’d lost their way. But The Sympathizer is a
return to form not merely from an acting and writing standpoint but from a
technical one: it’s the most daring series I’ve seen of that level since the
undervalued Landscapers in 2021 – another series that leaned into the cinematic
levels of the medium. So watch The Sympathizer. Robert Downey deserves
to be marveled over and recognized but he clearly saw something in this story
that made it worth him attaching his name to – and that could have worked just
as well without him. (Though to be clear, I’m glad he’s in it.)
My score: 4.5
stars.
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