HBOâs âThe Sympathizer,â which traces the diasporic aftershocks of the Vietnam War, establishes its pitch-black humor and moral complexity almost immediately, with a scene set in Saigon days before its fall. Though a fortunate few among the South Vietnamese military have been guaranteed spots on planes bound for the United States, each man is allowed admittance only for himself, his wife, and âa child.â Upon hearing the news, a major (Phanxinê), nicknamed Dumpling, plans to leave behind his daughter so that he can bring his mother. (âYou can always have another kid,â he figures.) A less coöperative soldier threatens suicide if he canât secure five more seats. The Captain (Hoa Xuande), the officer with the power to decide the final flight manifest, is unmoved by the ultimatum. He gestures toward a handgun on his desk, then heads for the door. âIâll give you some privacy,â he says. âMake it fast.â
The Captain, a North Vietnamese undercover agent who has embedded himself in the intelligence office of a South Vietnamese military leader known as the General (Toan Le), looks forward to helping remake his homeland after the Communistsâ victory. Instead, heâs instructed by his handler, Man (Duy Nguyá» n), to follow the General and his family to Los Angeles. There, the Captain finds his place among the refugee community, romances an older woman (Sandra Oh) who preaches free love, and waits for sporadic communiqués from Hanoi. The surveillance job gives him purpose but leaves him in limbo. While his compatriots discover new lives and possibilities in California, the Captainâa biracial, effectively orphaned bastard whose college years in the state a decade prior left him âfascinated and repulsedâ by Americaâis tasked with carrying out his one-man forever mission in secret.
Like its protagonist, the bilingual seven-part miniseries is proudly protean. âThe Sympathizer,â an adaptation of Viet Thanh Nguyenâs Pulitzer-winning novel, is an espionage thriller, a refugee drama, and a war tragedy, as well as a violent farce and a Hollywood sendup. Thanks to the Korean director Park Chan-wook, who served as a co-showrunner, itâs also an exercise in style, awash in the earth hues of the nineteen-seventies and the jewel tones favored by the auteur. As in Parkâs filmsânamely, âOldboyâ and âThe Handmaidenââdark comedy, convoluted chronologies, and fanciful torture scenes abound. The narrative jumps forward and backward in time, framed by the Captainâs eventual imprisonment in a North Vietnamese military camp where, as part of his âreëducation,â heâs prodded to write and rewrite his so-called confessions; every revision casts doubt on the events weâve seen depicted. The sense of disorientation is compounded by the multitudinous performances of Robert Downey, Jr., who plays no fewer than four characters, differentiated from one another through wigs, contacts, and accents. He embodies the institutions that, working in lockstep, created the conditions for the U.S. intrusion into Vietnam: Washington paranoia, Cold War militarism, academic racism, and cultural imperialism. At one point, Downey, as the unblinkingly intense, eerily ubiquitous C.I.A. agent Claude, ushers the Captain into a steak house, which he calls âthe natural habitat of the most dangerous creature on earth: a white man in a suit and tie.â
Parkâs flair for irony-drunk action is deployed to the greatest effect midway through the series, after the Captain deflects suspicion from himself by framing Dumpling as a mole, and the Generalâfearing for his reputation among the tight-knit Vietnamese refugeesâorders a hit. When Dumpling gets home from work one evening, the Captain draws him out with the offering of a durian, then tussles with him in a carport under a balcony where Dumplingâs beloved, utterly oblivious mother is taking a smoke break. Incapable of looking his victim in the eye, the hardly hardened Captain resorts to hiding Dumplingâs face with a paper bag from a nearby burger joint. Itâs mordant and tragic and suspenseful and strangeâa scene with kill-or-be-killed stakes set against the backdrop of L.A.âs many run-down apartments. In the aftermath, the pungent fruit lies abandoned in a corner, a distinctly Asian memento mori.
âThe Sympathizerâ is most successful as a portrait of such intra-community conflicts and desires. Claudeâs assessment of the General as an âimpotent clownâ isnât wrong, but his capacity to inspire and to mobilize his followers, however diminished, canât be entirely dismissed. Throughout the series, the ousted leader goes to great lengths to preserve something of the standing he once enjoyed, stoking fantasies of re-starting the war to vanquish the Communists and reclaim everything that South Vietnam lostâa list that includes his daughter Lana (Vy Le), who has thrown herself into American culture with disconcerting speed. Political tensions run high at community gatherings, where an errant sentiment can prompt whole families to walk out in disgust. The series is particularly empathetic toward the men, some of whom come to believe that it wouldâve been preferable to die in battle than to live with the indignities of asylum and the agony of loss.
âThe Sympathizerâ also excels in satirizing the racism that attended, and, in some cases, abetted, the Vietnam War, skewering everyone from self-important student activists to the film icon (and infamous yellowface practitioner) David Carradine. In one subplot, the Captain finds work as a cultural consultant on an antiwar action flick whose pompous, Francis Ford Coppola-esque director (Downey) generates sympathy for civilians by comparing them to water buffalo: âinnocent, modest, docile.â Another job forces the Captain into the orbit of a professor of Oriental studies (Downey, yet again) who calls himself an eggâwhite on the outside, yellow on the insideâand freely fetishizes his Asian and Asian American employees.
But Park and his co-creator, Don McKellar, never quite get these disparate elements to gel. In the novel, the Captainâs medium is his message: his lyrically reproachful narration betrays his bourgeois sensibility and jaded world view. The show, though frequently poignant and entertaining, is pulled in too many directions to establish any real sense of his interior life. The Captain asserts early on that he âwas cursed to see every issue from both sides,â but, for all that we hear about his identity crisis, we feel neither his revolutionary fervor for the Marxist cause nor his anguish at being seduced by the American promise of ease and reinvention. Late in the series, his interrogators become impatient with his evasions, using increasingly horrific methods in pursuit of a genuine revelation. âThereâs always something more to confess,â one says. For better or for worse, he gives almost nothing away. â¦