Roush Review: Downey Times 4 in HBO’s Spy Thriller ‘The Sympathizer’
Review
The Sympathizer
Come to HBO‘s sensational The Sympathizer for the stunt, to marvel at the versatility of Oscar winner Robert Downey Jr. inhabiting multiple extravagant roles, recalling Peter Sellers‘ tour de force in Dr. Strangelove. Stay to get immersed in the tortured saga of an unnamed half-Vietnamese, half-French antihero who sees himself as “a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces … cursed to see every issue from both sides.”
Known only as the Captain (the appealing, sensitively boyish Hoa Xuande), this Communist “sympathizer” is a double agent secretly working for the North Vietnamese during the Vietnam War. He embeds himself as a trusted aide to a delusional South Vietnamese general, whom he reluctantly follows to the U.S. after the fall of Saigon—memorably re-created during a harrowing and explosive evacuation sequence.
His identity as a biracial, bilingual, American-educated spy makes the Captain “a synthesis of incompatibilities,” a duality that becomes even more pronounced when he and his fellow war refugees start new lives in 1970s Los Angeles. Smartly adapted by South Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook (Oldboy) and Don McKellar from Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Sympathizer is framed as a confession being written, and rewritten, by an imprisoned Captain in what appears to be a Vietnamese re-education camp. How he gets there is a winding, wild and weird story of deceit, guilt, murder and culture-shock social satire.
Irony flavors each twist of the Captain’s journey, whether falling for a wry Japanese American woman (Sandra Oh, spot on as always), who declares “the only kind of love I believe in is free love” or being tasked to unearth the mole in his community, nobody suspecting it’s actually him. The suspenseful seven-part series’ high point arrives midway through, when he’s hired as an advisor on an Apocalypse Now-style Vietnam War epic. His secret mission: to make sure the Viet Cong get “some good lines.” (In terrific cameos, David Duchovny appears as a Method-acting zealot, with John Cho as an Asian actor who’s resigned to dying in every film.)
Downey gives his showiest performance as the movie’s temperamental director, triggering the Captain’s traumatic memories with his desire for authenticity. He also scores as a manipulative CIA agent, a hawkish politician and a smug, flamboyant professor of what was then known as Oriental Studies.
That they, and he, don’t entirely steal the show should tell you something about The Sympathizer‘s cumulative provocative power.
The Sympathizer, Series Premiere, Sunday, April 14, 9/8c, HBO
