HBO’s The Sympathizer enters the television lineup with two strikes against it. In the first place, the limited series’s 2015 source novel, by Viet Thanh Nguyen, was among the worst Pulitzer Prize winners in recent memory, a geopolitical navel-gazer that “thrilled” flattering book critics’ voguish anti-Westernism. In the second, the show’s conceit has already been tried. Viewers interested in the stateside machinations of Vietnamese spies need merely watch the superb fifth season of FX’s The Americans.
Of course, HBO’s latest has its own noteworthy qualities, chief among them a certain gonzo charm and compelling work by Robert Downey Jr., an actor fast approaching national treasure status. Watching the series, however, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that something has gone wrong. A work of political complaint, The Sympathizer lacks both an understanding of the moment and a sense of proportion. Whatever one thinks of its ideas, one would be hard-pressed to argue that they land.
The series opens with a legitimately fine pilot episode set in 1975 Saigon. Though the city has not yet fallen, Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces are only kilometers away, and a dwindling American contingent is preparing to evacuate some number of its allies. Among the lucky few is a young man known only as “the captain” (Hoa Xuande), a South Vietnamese aide-de-camp whose half-French ancestry has long marked him as an object of scorn. Assigned exclusively to “the general” (Toan Le), the captain has access to any number of military and intelligence secrets. He is also, inevitably, a North Vietnamese mole, tasked with delivering information to his longtime friend and handler, Man (Duy Nguyen).
Had The Sympathizer stayed in the collapsing capital, it might have accomplished something of real value, dramatizing for forgetful audiences the “glories” of communist “reunification.” Instead, the captain soon escapes with the general to Los Angeles, where the pair must find their place within a restive expatriate community. What follows is part social commentary, part postwar melodrama, and part Hollywood spoof, as the captain stumbles from academia to refugee enclaves to a working film set. All the while, our protagonist is sending coded notes to Man back home. The South Vietnamese army may have scattered, but somebody has to keep an eye on the dregs.
As in Nguyen’s novel, the action here is accompanied by pop-psychological self-diagnoses on the part of the captain. Thus do we learn, in typically obtrusive voice-over, that our hero is “a man of two faces, cursed to see every issue from both sides.” This theme, clearly beloved by the series’s creators, is everywhere, as subtle as the ARVN officer who pockets a CIA candy jar in an early scene. A man of dual ancestry, the captain both loves and hates his American contacts. A loyal friend to fellow refugee Bon (Fred Nguyen Khan), he is nevertheless a killer, using Independence Day fireworks — note the irony! — to drown out a vicious communist shooting.
To be sure, the show’s plot moves briskly forward, rarely pausing long enough to permit moss to gather. Yet its foremost features are the performances, plural, of its biggest star. When viewers first meet Downey, the recent Oscar winner is Claude, a CIA operative with a taste for motorcycles and forced confessions. Later in the series, the performer appears as a fey oriental studies professor, a congressman in the John McCain style, and a Francis Ford Coppola knockoff directing what is plainly a nod to Apocalypse Now.
Though reportedly a method actor, Downey’s success in recent outings has been largely physical. Note his shape-shifting brilliance in last year’s otherwise overrated Oppenheimer. Here, the screen veteran is all jaws and teeth, chewing his words one moment and fairly sighing them the next. It is a mark of the actor’s expertise (and of the show’s terrific hair and makeup design) that Downey’s characters remain instantly differentiable throughout. More than that: Each performance is delightful in its own right. Perhaps Daniel Day-Lewis could have pulled off such a feat had he gone slumming on HBO. The list of other actors I would have trusted with Downey’s task could be numbered with a closed fist.
As in most instances of stunt casting, however, the gesture’s technical success is a different matter than its purpose. Downey is great, but why use him in so self-consciously bizarre a fashion? The answer has to do in part with the series’s aesthetics. The Sympathizer is the kind of show that signals narrative flashbacks with rewinding-VHS-tape noises. Why shouldn’t we expect an additional bit of razzle-dazzle elsewhere?
Yet the more substantive explanation concerns ideology rather than tone. Buried in HBO’s screener notes is the admission that Downey’s casting is meant to illustrate “how the divisions of the American establishment are intertwined and in collusion.” Downey plays “four distinct patriarchal figures in our hero’s path” and reveals through each some element of American oppression.
Though obviously abstract, this thematic work is plain enough for viewers versed in contemporary orthodoxies. It is also, to put it bluntly, a show-destroying cliche. America has struggled with racism? The CIA has behaved badly abroad? The accusations are not just decades too late to make a splash; they are literally among the foundational notions of our 21st-century political discourse. Like its winking episode titles (e.g., “Love It or Leave It”), the series’s various indictments have little rhetorical juice left to squeeze. Late to its own depressing party, The Sympathizer critiques an American self-regard that no longer exists.
And what, in any case, are we to make of a program with so poor a sense of historical scale? Downey’s Claude is a war criminal who ought to be dragged to The Hague. His professor Hammer, meanwhile, is a mere Asian-fetishizing fool. Only a moral idiot would conflate the two, and therein lies The Sympathizer’s problem. A show constructed by and for the Left, it doesn’t know what it doesn’t know. Progressive viewers will nod furiously along until their necks hurt. The rest of us are more likely to roll our eyes.
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Graham Hillard is editor at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal and a Washington Examiner magazine contributing writer.