HBO's Remarkable 'The Sympathizer' Is Disorienting for a Reason

By Dustin Rowles | TV | April 16, 2024 |

By Dustin Rowles | TV | April 16, 2024 |

HBO’s The Sympathizer drops us into 1975 Saigon, four months before its fall. The action centers on the otherwise unnamed Captain (Hoa Xuande), a police captain for the South Vietnam army who is secretly a communist spy for North Vietnam. He’s meeting with Claude, an arrogant American CIA Agent played by Robert Downey, Jr. They are in a movie theater watching a Communist being tortured for information.

There is so much to take in during the opening minutes of The Sympathizer that I had to stop, refresh myself on the state of Vietnam in 1975, and reorient myself. In 1975, North Vietnam — backed by the Soviet Union and China — was on the brink of overrunning South Vietnam after a defeated United States military had pulled out. The war was basically over save for the formalities, including the evacuation of the General (Toan Le) — a Southern Vietnamese general that the Captain serves under — facilitated by Claude and the Captain as part of Operation Frequent Wind. The General tasks the Captain with curating a list of evacuees, while he is also tasked by his North Vietnamese handler and childhood friend, Man (Duy Nguyễn), with leaking the contents of that list to the communists.

The more difficult thing to immediately adjust to, however, is the idea that the protagonist is a complicated figure who is a communist working as a spy for North Vietnam rather than the clear-cut hero that our historical and television narratives have conditioned us to expect. But that is among the notions The Sympathizer — based on Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel — is designed to challenge. The Captain, meanwhile, lives under several dual identities: He’s half French, half Vietnamese; he’s a North Vietnamese communist working as a spy inside the South Vietnamese police; he’s a mole in Vietnam and, later, an immigrant in the United States. The other duality at work here is that while we call the conflict the Vietnamese War, those in Vietnam call it the American War. The viewers’ perspective in The Sympathizer is of the fallout of The American War, where the United States, for once, is not the main character.

It also takes some mental agility to sort out the timelines. The series opens with the Captain being interrogated in a North Vietnamese prison, presumably after the events depicted in the show. From there, it jumps back to four months before the fall of Saigon, where the Captain — posing as a South Vietnamese police officer — watches a communist colleague being tortured.

The timeline then jumps back another two days, revealing that the name the police are trying to extract from the tortured woman is the Captain’s own. The narrative jumps back further, this time three days, to introduce the dynamic between the Captain, his North Vietnamese handler, and his South Vietnamese best friend.

The storytelling continues to shift back and forth, moving two months forward, then two days before the fall of Saigon, and finally ending the episode during the chaos of Operation Frequent Wind, the evacuation of Saigon. The series then jumps again to the future, with the nostalgic Captain hearing an American song from within his North Vietnamese prison cell.

The structure of The Sympathizer forces the viewer to piece together the web of the Captain’s divided loyalties amid the larger historical context. Creator/writer/director Park Chan-wook (Oldboy) takes a disorienting approach that mirrors the Captain’s own fractured identity and the moral ambiguities of the Vietnam War. As the Captain navigates his various identities and loyalties, the show delves deep into the internal conflict that arises from his dual roles as a communist spy, a South Vietnamese police officer, and a man caught between two cultures.

While it takes some effort to untangle, the payoff in the premiere episode is worth it. The show is historically fascinating, thrilling, and intense while also incorporating humor that evokes the metafictional satire of Catch 22, evident in the bumbling characters (like the General), Downey’s portrayal of an obnoxious American CIA Agent (one of many characters he plays), and a hysterical sequence in which a police officer demands a place on an evacuation plane for his mother, threatening to kill himself if denied. The Captain, calling his bluff, hands over his gun and ammunition and leaves the room to give the officer a few minutes to follow through. Instead, the officer looks at the gun and then at a candy jar, stuffs all the candy inside his hat, and leaves.

It’s good TV that offers a unique perspective — for Americans — on the Vietnam War from one of the best in the business, Park Chan-wook. In addition to Downey, Jr., who is certain to grab an Emmy nomination at least, the series also boasts a strong performance from Hoa Xuande, who somehow manages to make us feel sympathy for both sides of the cause. I can’t wait to see how the rest of the series unfolds.

‘The Sympathizer’ airs on HBO on Sunday nights.