The Sympathizer TV review — HBO spy series subverts Hollywood Vietnam war movies

It’s said that history is written by the victors, but in the case of the Vietnam war, American perspectives have long shaped the collective memories of the conflict. The Sympathizer, a new HBO mini-series from Don McKellar and the feted director Park Chan-wook, is a corrective to this western narrative. A smart, stylish adaptation of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s eponymous 2015 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, it sharply subverts a catalogue of America-centric Vietnam movies — such as Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket and Platoon — by depicting the US of the 1970s through Vietnamese eyes.

More specifically, the striking emerald-green eyes of a protagonist known only as the Captain. A communist North Vietnamese spy embedded deeply within the US-backed South Vietnamese secret police, he receives orders to follow his fleeing general to America from Saigon and to report back on any counter-revolutionary activity. But while the grinding war itself is drawing to a close, an internal struggle rages within him. 

The Captain (Hoa Xuande), as he himself observes during a flash-forward, is “a synthesis of incompatibilities”. As a bilingual, biracial man, he’s viewed as an “other” by both the compatriots he risks his life for and the Americans he lives among. As a communist cast adrift in a land governed by insatiable capitalism and irresistible pop culture, he finds himself equally repelled and compelled. With time, the dread of being exposed by the enemy is supplanted by concerns about the effects of being overly exposed to their world.

The show revels in the intricacies of espionage: there are elaborate coded communications, cover-threatening ethical dilemmas and counter-counter-intelligence missions. But it also uses spycraft as an analogue for the broader immigrant experience of being caught between one’s origins and one’s adopted environment, between a “true” identity and an assumed one. Often the incongruities are stark. The General (Toan Le, excellent), for instance, plots a military campaign from the back office of his liquor shop in the LA-sprawl, a reminder of the gulf that sometimes opens up between an immigrant’s past life and their new, frequently unassuming role in western society.

The story’s thematic richness is well complemented by Park’s thoughtful direction. Often the fluid camerawork illuminates unspoken details and wry ironies: a communist gun concealed in a Coke can; an execution of an America-loving Vietnamese man drowned out by July 4 fireworks. 

Assurance and nuance can also be found in a lively, witty script and Xuande’s wonderfully layered lead performance. Less convincing is the part (or rather parts) played by Robert Downey Jr (who also executive produces). Appearing in four roles — as a shady CIA agent, a camp Orientalist academic, a conservative congressman and an uncompromising auteur director — that are meant to “represent America as a whole” (according to Park), the actor visibly has a blast hamming it up. But these exaggerated archetypes risk pushing the series from dark historical satire to overblown, unwieldy farce.

An entire episode set on a nightmarish shoot of a Vietnam epic, for example, makes valid points about American soft power and the erasure of other voices but feels like a tonally jarring spin-off of the 2008 comedy film Tropic Thunder. The joke is of course on Hollywood, but it also arguably comes at the expense of the more rewarding Vietnamese-focused story.

★★★★☆

On Sky Atlantic/NOW from May 27 at 9pm. Streaming on MAX in the US