Max’s Vietnam War Series ‘The Sympathizer’ is an Energetic Delight

Park only helms the first three episodes, but he sets a mischievous tone and establishes a high bar in the process. The result is a self-reflexive tale of identity that charges out the gate with reckless abandon and blistering cinematic energy. It remains at least intriguing even if it gradually loses steam.

The story, framed as a lengthy coerced confession in the mid-1970s, follows a captain whose name we never learn (Hoa Xuande), and who claims, to his North Vietnamese captors in a re-education camp, that he has spent the last several years as a spy for their side, embedded within a South Vietnamese community in California. This kicks off a series of flashbacks set at the tail end of the Vietnam War—or, as it's called in Vietnam, the American War; a distinction in the opening text crawl—right before the fall of Saigon. The blue-eyed, French-Vietnamese Captain, having attended college in the United States, serves as communications director to a high-ranking General (Toan Le), and liaises with U.S. intelligence via the shifty C.I.A. operative Claude (Robert Downey Jr.), before escaping to Los Angeles with the remnants of the upper echelons of the U.S.-backed South Vietnamese army.

Notably, the quietly commanding, Ed Harris-like Claude is one of several characters played by Downey Jr., one of Hollywood's most recognizable faces, who slots in as a number of broad "types” reminiscent of well-known figures. As Claude, he wears bright blue contact lenses similar to Xuande's, giving both men an uncanny appearance. But the Avengers star also plays the Captain's old college professor, an Oriental studies department head reminiscent of queer filmmaker John Waters, in addition to playing a slimy, raspy, Reagan-esque politician, and an ambitious Hollywood filmmaker working on a Vietnam War movie reminiscent of Apocalypse Now (though rather than playing this character as that film's director, Francis Ford Coppola, Downey Jr. plays him practically as himself).

These multiple roles are part of the series' hook, but they're more than just a marketing gimmick. Not only do they afford Downey Jr. the chance to let loose and have fun with a litany of zany performances, but they take on a symbolic meaning too. The actor appears only in flashbacks that represent the Captain's confessions under duress, and he always represents some element of American power and hegemony against which the Captain struggles, whether military, academic, political, or artistic. His surreal presence adds just enough doubt to the Captain's recollections, making him an unreliable narrator, while also symbolizing the numerous forces with which he must contend as an Asian in the United States forced to balance dueling identities.

The Captain is Vietnamese and French—at times, he feels like neither, though his closest friends remind him he's worth twice as much as most people—and he's also a mole with conflicting loyalties. So, his persona is in constant flux. The show, like the novel, uses spy craft as a metaphor for the unease, the duality, and constant self-awareness of Asian American immigrant life, where assimilation might come at the cost of authenticity.

Park’s trilogy of episodes channel these charged metaphors in absurd ways. The Captain's flashbacks appear in the form of film reels which he rewinds and fast-forwards while recalling events out of order, and the camera always seems to zoom and dip and shift in focus, moving impatiently until it finds an object or person on which to train its gaze. It's delightful to watch: a dark comedy about belonging punctuated by deathly serious moments, but one that never slows down across its first three chapters, thanks to Park's wild commitment to economic storytelling in motion.

Unfortunately, Park's successors in the director's chair—City of God filmmaker Fernando Meirelles for the middle chapter, and The Secret Garden's Marc Munden for the final three—aren't quite able to balance the show's satirical whimsy with its more straightforward drama (they tend to focus more on the latter). However, the Meirelles-directed fourth episode, "Give Us Some Good Lines," also serves as a meta-textual look at Hollywood's historically poor treatment of Vietnamese characters and backdrops, with the Captain serving as a consultant on a film that, despite its attempts to capture the grandeur of Apocalypse Now or Platoon, plays more like the Ben Stiller-directed parody Tropic Thunder (which also featured Robert Downey Jr. donning various outfits).

As the show goes on, it digs deeper into numerous subplots that test the Captain's commitment to his cause, from his genuine love for South Vietnamese friends, to his whirlwind romance with a free-spirited, older Japanese American professor (Sandra Oh), to his animosity with a precocious, communist-leaning Vietnamese reporter (Alan Trong), with whom he agrees politically deep down, but who he needs to investigate and rebuff to maintain his cover. All the while, his identity becomes increasingly fluid, as he's torn between his commitment to the North Vietnamese army, and the personal ethics of how far he is (or isn't) willing to go in the name of revolution, in a show that’s as fun as it is introspective.