The Sympathizer

A complex and deeply moving drama that may well shift your perspective on the Vietnam War.

Brilliant, unsettling, entertaining.

“The Sympathizer” walks a tightrope but is fearless about tackling uncomfortable subject matter. It’s smart and mesmerizing.

Working alongside co-showrunner Don McKellar (of the underrated Canadian series Sensitive Skin), Park has crafted a vibrant, faithful yet often audacious Sympathizer, premiering April 14, that matches executive producer Nguyen’s brilliant novel in both ambition and execution.

The show’s depiction of what it was like to leave Saigon just before the end of the war is some of the year’s most harrowing, captivating television. It’s truly transportive television, the kind of show that really does open your eyes to a new perspective on the world — and keeps you surprised the entire time.

It’s a spy thriller, a satire of colonialism and its many faces — many of them Robert Downey Jr.’s — and an exploration of the complications of love and memory. But it’s also an intense dialogue and argument with the movies. It is simultaneously its own Vietnam War movie, bold, inventive and sometimes bloody, as well as a pointed, detailed work of movie criticism.

Come 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 suspenseful saga of an unnamed half-Vietnamese, half-French antihero. [22 Apr - 12 May 2024, p.4]

Xuande's profoundly rich and emotionally agile work stabilizes this stylized and situational madness, defying the quotidian "sane man in an insane world" characterization by aiming for something more complicated.

There is a certain prestige quality to The Sympathizer that distinguishes it from most other current series, alongside its willingness to challenge viewers with complicated characters and stories. It’s that same fearlessness that many HBO original series successfully captured in the late 2000s, continuing throughout the next decade of titles. To put it simply, The Sympathizer is a future television classic.

Succeeding as both an almost academic inquisition into the nebulous nature of racial identity and a raucous spy tale, as well as a high-speed comedy and a dark, biting drama. .... Inch by inch, he [The Captain] loses himself—and Xuande makes sure that we feel every agonizing moment of his slow self-destruction.

He's [Robert Downey Jr.] also part of an impressive cast that includes Sandra Oh, Alan Trong, and Vy Le, but the series wouldn't work without Xuande serving as anchor.

To say it’s a melting pot of creative voices would be an understatement, and this panoply of POVs is central to the success of “The Sympathizer” in that it’s a show about cultural displacement and geographical confusion in many ways.

The Captain holds it all together, in a remarkable turn by Xuande, as our lead tries to pinpoint his own identity among the disparate pieces of the parts he’s forced to play.

The only downside to all this is that, on occasion, it feels like it has blown all of its emotional budget on style rather than substance. .... For the most part, though, The Sympathizer is exciting, meaty and a reminder that drama that demands your full and complete attention can be well worth the effort.

It is a demanding watch, but its storytelling and visual audacity are a searing endorsement of just how thrilling television can be when risks are taken and the audience is trusted to keep up.

Between Downey’s character-juggling, the constantly time-skipping narrative structure, and a snappy, hair gel-slick aesthetic sensibility, it would be easy to write off The Sympathizer as being more style than substance. But make no mistake, this is a series that is really about something, that tackles expansive subject matter with clarity and verve.

For all its daffy comedy and action spectacle, this is a very cerebral, challenging series. And it’s definitely a challenge worth taking on.

In trying to capture the sprawling temper of an ailing community in a fractured era, The Sympathizer may not quite live up to its literary predecessor. But it is television worth seeking out and contending with.

Those fiddly shades of gray — the series’ best — necessarily recede as the plot progresses. The last episodes are inferior to the first three (which Park Chan-wook directed). That’s not a condemnation. It was probably inevitable that this show’s extraordinary visual and narrative confidence would falter as it tried to square the ideological schema in which its characters operate with the wonderfully messy story about them it produced.

While the series concentrates on the powerful — and formerly powerful — Park also does a fine job of evoking the ordinary, healthy community around them, establishing itself anew at various events and gatherings. It’s not a world we’ve seen in a big-budget, big-deal TV series; there are more stories to tell there.

But even when The Sympathizer falls apart, the show’s failures are almost as fun as the triumphs — they have meat to them. They’re the result of someone making a choice. The series is at its best when Park’s visuals and narrative devices clearly articulate everything going on under the story’s hood. It’s rare an essay prompt feels this fun.

Park Chan-wook and Don McKellar, co-showrunners on The Sympathizer, have mounted a stylish, smart, and sometimes surreal adaptation of a complex and self-reflective novel, although the series, which premieres Sunday, can’t always keep its dramatic footing.

He’s [Hoa Xuande] great. Even with that performance, those visuals, and that sense of humor, there are occasions — particularly in the finale, which largely takes place at the reeducation camp — where The Sympathizer, like its hero, gets too lost in its own head. More often than not, though, it works very well, despite the high degree of difficulty that would come with any adaptation of the book.

“The Sympathizer” is ostentatious enough in its own choices to stress that every story is the result of someone’s discretion — and no one’s account is ever definitive.

It’s not just Apocalypse Now and Platoon that are dissected here, but the jingoistic, exploitative and unrepresentative nature of so many war films. However, the truly exceptional attribute the show has is that while it excels in this, it is also a detailed, evocative and emotional character study, which really gets under the skin of its protagonist.

There's an intoxicating messiness to the seven-part series, but the nihilistic worldview makes it all coalesce into a coherent character study by its close, using that cynicism to get under its unknowable lead's skin with surprisingly affecting results.

The talented writers and directors can only do so much—it works because of Hoa Xuande.

There's a lot to keep track of initially, but once the basics are sorted through it becomes easier to meet The Sympathizer on its very stylized terms.

On occasion, it feels as if we’re spending a little bit too much time with fringe characters who aren’t nearly as captivating as the main players, but the dialogue sings and the visuals are never less than stunning, and the performances range from solid to great.

The first three episodes are likely locks for various Emmy nominations. However, as soon as Fernando Meirelles ("City of God") and Marc Munden ("The Secret Garden") take over directorial duties, “The Sympathizer” falters. What was once enthralling becomes merely competent; most of all, the latter two directors lack Park’s audacious levity. Nonetheless, “The Sympathizer” is a riveting watch.

There’s going to be a lot of quirky characters, a lot of stylistic filmmaking techniques used, and a very solid sense of place and time that permeates the entire narrative. That tends to be a good thing, and it will serve this narrative well. We just hope that The Sympathizer doesn’t get distracted by its gimmicks and focuses on Captain’s story.

The show, though frequently poignant and entertaining, is pulled in too many directions to establish any real sense of his [the Captain's] interior life.

Downey stands in for multiple ugly Americans, but the series descends into a narrative quagmire and, despite powerful moments, can’t consistently pull itself out.

While Hoa Xuande and Fred Nguyen Khan stand out in their roles, The Sympathizer does a disservice to its source material by leaving out specific themes and key plots that leave the characters feeling empty.

This version of The Sympathizer is still substantive and audacious, a slab of satire and deeply felt human tragedy that’s worthy of conversation and consideration, even if the consideration leads to the conclusion that a kitchen-sink approach that worked on the page struggles to coalesce on the screen.

No matter an invigorated early going, however, it’s a venture that ultimately falls victim to its own bifurcations, torn apart by its desire to serve myriad masters at the same time.