Biographical entertainment about finding identity can be tedious or simply underwhelming. Sometimes the depiction of someone’s internal shifts — considered game-changers for character development — isn’t depicted well and just turn into a melodramatic snoozefest.
HBO’s newest original series, The Sympathizer, has accomplished that rare feat: circumventing the pitfalls by seeing the humor in that journey.
This is accomplished by having a sharp, risk-taking South Korean director in Park Chan-wook, underrated young Aussie-Vietnamese actor Hoa Xuande and recent Oscar winner Robert Downey Jr. in no less than four antagonist roles.
The premise of the series centers on a tale of a forced confession, thus subjective and likely unreliable. Nearing the end of the Vietnam War, the Captain (our semi-reliable narrator and hero played by Hoa Xuande), a bi-racial soldier educated as a scholar in the USA, rises through the ranks with the help of a general in the nationalist and democracy-loving South Vietnam Army. The general values the Captain so greatly that the Captain secures a seat on a plane to the USA, in the process escaping the Fall of Saigon in 1975 and eventually relocating to Los Angeles as a refugee.
The twist? The Captain is really a communist spy, undercover and embedded by the Northern Vietnamese. His cover? Being an intelligence officer spying on the communists. Even in the USA, the Captain is still reporting intel to his real masters in the now victorious Communist Army.
Why, it’s worthy of Downey, a.k.a. RDJ’s actor-ception in Tropic Thunder, where he was "…a dude playing a dude disguised as another dude." It’s viciously dramatic. And the series is likewise hilarious as hell.
Most of that is RDJ’s pluck and eagerness to dive into the four roles as a none too subtle metaphor for how all the significant white men in the life of The Captain always wanted something from him and how all his relationships with male Caucasian authorities are transactional. But that’s also Chan-wook making his point that the “…many faces of Western imperialism shared one single body,” according to a Vanity Fair interview.
In one of the earlier episodes (HBO gave us the whole season to review, but there’ll be no big spoilers going forward), we segue from an academic party where the Captain must declaim about how his Occidental and Oriental sides work in tandem yet also inevitably arouse friction (because he’s half-Viet and half-French), Later on, in a more intimate conversation, he confesses to a Japanese staffer from the university (Sandra Oh in another scene-stealing role) that he hates squid because as a horny teen with no man to educate him on his raging hormones, he once turned to the mollusk to satiate his budding needs.
Based on the Pulitzer-prize winning novel by Viet Thanh Nguyen’s, The Sympathizer may be classified as an espionage thriller crossed with historical satire. That it’s essentially making fun of the Vietnam War is both the thrilling and the comedic parts of it. Might make for strange bedfellows? Yeah, but wonder of wonders what might seem a bad idea on paper simply works in execution.
Chan-wook directs black comedy like he was born to it. Oldboy, for one, is widely considered brutal but you could see how it might also be comical. Plenty of the mojo in the series is how up and coming Hoa Xuande inhabits his role as Captain and develops him into a figure to hate but only to become someone to pity and then root for. With a South East Asian face and blue-grey eyes, he grew up in a rural village, brought up by a single mother and so was bullied by the other Viet kids. “Devil with 13 buttholes!” they cried as they beat him.
The Captain grapples with his undercover identity as a nationalist soldier versus his real identity as a communist spy. But more than depicting the strange and bizarre life of a double agent, the series explores how our hero must confront the contradictions inside him. To flush out all the toxic falsities he’s done in the service of opposing causes. Eventually he may figure out who he truly is only by achieving the elusive catharsis of what he wants to be. What is that? We figure out over seven hour-long episodes.
As we laugh and commiserate with the Captain about how life as a spy is exciting, terrifying and patently ridiculous, director Chan-wook also challenges sensibilities about Southeast Asian culture, drawing for us political realities on an intimate scale.
That this takes place in such a turbulent historical setting—and perhaps it could not have been done with such humor 10 years ago?—at a time when great slaughter and protest was being done in Vietnam and in its name, is a sign that maybe this IS the right time to look back. Turn our collective heads to see the scars as something under many lenses, other than just unfettered tragedy.
A rare feat that, all things considered, is a must-see and worthy of the time it takes to binge-watch.
HBO’s The Sympathizer is available to stream on Max by 14 April.
