See The Sympathizer for Four Times The Robert Downey, Jr.
Stay for a Compelling Narrative on Vietnam You’ve Never Heard Before
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.