‘The Sympathizer’ Review: Park Chan-Wook, Robert Downey Jr. Are in Inspired Pairing for HBO’s Ambitious Adaptation

There is so much going on in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2015 novel “The Sympathizer” that it would take a team of true craftsmen even to attempt to unpack it in episodic form. HBO is lucky they hired one of the best in Park Chan-Wook, a supremely and undeniably talented director. The South Korean auteur filmmaker behind “Decision to Leave,” “Oldboy,” and many more brings his remarkable tonal confidence to the first three episodes of “The Sympathizer,” which almost plays like a three-hour new film by the award-winning director. He stays on as a co-writer and producer but hands subsequent episodes off to Fernando Meirelles (“City of God”) and Marc Munden (“The Secret Garden”), and the show struggles a bit to live up to the standard of that initial trio, but never completely falters. From beginning to end, it’s a genre mash-up that’s not like anything else on television, a show that plays like war drama, satire, character study, and cultural commentary simultaneously. Park’s films have a habit of playing with identity and perception, making him a perfect fit for “The Sympathizer,” a show about how nothing is quite what it seems, how trauma can be commodified, and how loyalty has its limits. This is a smart, well-made TV—no surprise, given who made it.

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The excellent Hoa Xuande, an Australian-Vietnamese actor, plays the unnamed narrator. In the show’s remarkable series premiere, our conflicted hero is in Saigon mere days before its fall, working for a South Vietnamese general (a pitch-perfect Toan Le) but giving information to both the North Vietnamese and a U.S. CIA contact played with quirky perfection Robert Downey Jr., who also produces. Downey actually plays several American roles, most of which critics are not allowed to spoil. Suffice it to say that Downey’s overall role seems to be representative of a very American brand of exploitation that shifts to indifference, the way powerful people in this country often use international assets in a manner that never considers what happens when they’re done. The fact that Downey plays multiple roles plays into the show’s unpacking of shifting identity throughout the limited series while also feeling almost like a nod to Stanley Kubrick, who used the same trick in “Dr. Strangelove” and loved to tackle the military-industrial complex through satire.

From the beginning, “The Sympathizer” plays with perception, placing flashbacks in flashbacks, never quite letting the viewer get a firm grip on what’s happening in an effort to recreate the chaos of being a double agent in the final days of Vietnam. Ultimately, following a truly stunning scene set during Operation Frequent Wind (when the government tried to get some assets out of the country), the narrator finds himself in Los Angeles, but he’s still spying on the General, getting information back to the Viet Cong to one of his former best friends who is still trying to hold onto power there named Man (Duy Nguyen). Another of his childhood allies, Bon (Fred Nguyen Khan), ends up in L.A. with our protagonist, but he carries deep, unimaginable trauma, reminding his friend and the viewer of the cost of all of this subterfuge. That all three of these men ended up on such drastically different paths is one of the many ideas in this show that could form its own think piece.

Forget a piece; someone could write a whole small book on the centerpiece episode of “The Sympathizer,” the fourth chapter, directed by Meirelles. In an hour that could stand on its own as a short film, Park and Meirelles, two filmmakers who understand how filmmaking can amplify and also warp history/truth, transport us to the set of a Hollywood production about Vietnam (with some very familiar faces doing great work in the supporting cast that won’t be spoiled). The hero has become an advisor on a fictional production called “The Hamlet” (that bears a strong resemblance to “Platoon”), and what unfolds is a cavalcade of Hollywood egos and cultural insensitivities. In the middle of what is technically a war story, “The Sympathizer” is interrogating how war stories are told, amplified even further by the nesting doll structure of a show that’s largely a flashback—the hero is telling his story to an interrogator—told by an unreliable narrator. All of this meta-structural gameplay allows for the gray areas of loyalty and identity to come even more prominently to the surface, making for a program that’s somehow both remarkably refined on a craft level but also somehow narratively haphazard and confusing, like a protagonist who is uncertain of his own place in the world.

After that phenomenal opening trio and the Hollywood episode, “The Sympathizer” admittedly struggles to keep momentum a bit in the back half of the season, but never to a drastic enough degree to sink the entire endeavor. There’s just too much going on here for the show ever to get boring. There’s also a fascinating interplay of cultures here in that it’s a show by a Vietnamese author, adapted by Korean, American, and Canadian writers and directed by Korean, Brazilian, and British filmmakers. To say it’s a melting pot of creative voices would be an understatement, and this panoply of POVs is central to the success of “The Sympathizer” in that it’s a show about cultural displacement and geographical confusion in many ways.

Of course, the title is a reference to a term used in warfare for someone who could be detrimental to a political cause, but it also feels like a call for understanding and sympathy for people who have been forced to navigate impossible systems, political structures and even entertainment productions that use human trauma as a commodity. It’s almost critical of its own existence, and yet that’s one of the things that makes it so fascinating. More than most modern television about real trauma, it understands that it can really only capture a fraction of the complexity of something like Vietnam and the environment in that country and the United States after the war that no one won. Park and his team aren’t seeking to tell a universal story of a double agent, but they’ve captured something about conflict and espionage that’s rarely been seen in episodic television. From the general trying to assimilate into U.S. culture by opening a liquor store to the film director trying to recreate violence in the name of entertainment to the man forced to repress trauma that would otherwise incapacitate him, almost everyone here is a double agent. And most of them deserve our sympathy. [B+]

“The Sympathizer” premieres April 14 on MAX and HBO.