By Mark Leepson
There’s nothing “mini” about the seven-episode HBO limited series adaptation of The Sympathizer, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s brilliant, Pulitzer-Prize-winning 2016 novel, which ran in April and May and is now streaming on Max. And that’s a good thing.
From the opening credits of the first episode, showrunners and directors Park Chan-wook and Don McKellar maximize virtually every aspect of their seven-hour production—the music and the score, the cinemaphotography, the screenplay (including improvised lines), the special effects, sets, and their cast—to create a brilliant, bombastic work of cinematic art.
Each episode catches the full flavor of Viet Nguyen’s novel: a brash, creatively crafted tale told by a never-identified-by-name main character called The Captain. The book deals with the American war in Vietnam and the postwar political landscape in that country and in the post-war Vietnamese expatriate community in the U.S.
The series is filled with rapid-fire, realistic dialogue in English and Vietnamese and sardonic and laugh-out-loud humor. It’s at once a taut spy thriller, an over-the-top meditation on good and evil, and a raw expose of war and post-war perfidies by the Vietnamese communists, South Vietnamese nationalists, and American CIA operatives and politicians.
The Vietnamese-Australian actor Hoa Xuande does an exceptional job embodying The Captain and his tortuous conflicts and contradictions. In doing so, he goes through more emotional and physical hell in the series than Shelley Duvall did in The Shining. The man who calls himself “a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces” who “gave up [his] identity for the revolution,” wrestles existentially with his lot in life beginning with growing up as a shunned Eurasian child and adolescent.
During the American war, he surfaces as a communist operative working for The General, the head of the South Vietnamese secret police. At the war’s chaotic end (one of the most riveting scenes in both the book and the movie), as the communists are about to take over the country, The General orders him to join the exodus and go to the U.S. with him and his family. The Captain’s communist bosses take that opportunity to have him continue working undercover, this time in Southern California, keeping tabs on the The General and the other Vietnamese expats.
Robert Downey, Jr., chews the scenery (in a good way) playing four larger-than-life characters. That includes a creepy, brash, blabby CIA operative who we encounter both in the war and afterward; an auteur director from hell making an Apocalypse Now-like movie called The Hamlet; and a slimy California congressman pandering to the anti-communist South Vietnamese in Orange County in the late 1970s. Downey almost steals the show, including in a scene in which four of the characters are sitting in conversation around a round table in a restaurant. But Hoa Xunde and a strong cast of mostly Vietnamese actors more than hold their own as the plot spins out in seven intense and entertaining episodes.
That plot careens back and forth in time, centering on The Captain’s brutal, year-long stay in a Vietnamese re-education camp. The story also includes graphically depicted murder, mayhem, personal and political betrayal, and a few plot-twisting surprises.
It’s all thought-provoking and memorable. Binge watching is encouraged.
