The Sympathizer: Park Chan-wook's American Adaptation

The Sympathizer, HBO’s seven-episode adaptation of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s 2015 Pulitzer-winning novel, finished its run in May. It was an extraordinary piece of television and a genuinely strange one, and its critical reception has been, by prestige-TV standards, muted. Viewership was modest. The Emmy conversation has largely missed it. The specific formal strangeness of Park Chan-wook’s direction, the show’s co-directed structure, the Robert Downey Jr. casting trick: all of these are reasons the show’s reception has been slower than it should have been.

What the show is

The novel, which I should say upfront I have read twice, is told from the perspective of “the Captain,” a North Vietnamese communist mole embedded in the South Vietnamese military who escapes with the defeated South to Los Angeles in the final days of the Vietnam War and continues his intelligence work from within the Vietnamese refugee community. The Captain is a man of halves: half-French by parentage, half-Vietnamese by identity, half-communist by conviction, half-American by education. The novel is a first-person confession written from a North Vietnamese reeducation camp cell.

Park Chan-wook, co-showrunning with Don McKellar, has adapted the novel with a specific formal audacity that is rare in American prestige television. The show is episodic but also nonlinear, interleaving the present-day reeducation-camp framing with the Captain’s 1970s Los Angeles-based work. The camp scenes function as the Captain’s confession being dictated under duress. The Los Angeles scenes are the memory he is dictating.

Hoa Xuande, carrying the show

The Captain is played by Hoa Xuande, in what is, by any measure, the breakout performance of the year. Xuande, previously known for Australian television and minor supporting roles, is carrying a seven-episode HBO lead, and carrying it with the specific technical demand of playing a character whose entire mode is duplicity.

The Captain is lying to almost everyone in every scene. He is lying to his American supervisors about his loyalties. He is lying to his Vietnamese comrades about his ideological purity. He is lying to his best friends about his work. He is lying, sometimes, to himself. Xuande has to play all of these simultaneously, with the viewer, uniquely, given access to his real allegiances via narration.

The achievement of the performance is that the Captain is consistently sympathetic across all the lies. We understand why he lies. We understand the specific moral architecture he has built to justify his deceptions. We feel the cost of the deceptions when they accumulate. This is a hard, subtle piece of screen acting, and Xuande is doing it at a level his filmography did not predict.

The Robert Downey Jr. choice

The most-discussed formal decision in The Sympathizer is the casting of Robert Downey Jr. in multiple roles. Downey plays four separate American antagonists the Captain encounters: a CIA handler, a US military general-turned-politician, a Hollywood auteur director, and a congressman. All four are different white American men. All four are played by Downey.

The choice is, simultaneously, a satirical decision (the American empire has a single face across its different instruments) and a technical acting decision (Downey is asked to demonstrate real range across the four characters). Some viewers found the choice distracting, a specifically-Hollywood joke about Downey’s star persona that broke the show’s otherwise rigorous realism. Others, including me, found the choice perfectly calibrated to the novel’s own satirical argument about American power as a unified force wearing different faces.

Downey, it should be said, is having fun. The Hollywood-auteur-director role in particular, a specific parody of a late-career auteur making a Vietnam War film, lets Downey lean into his comic instincts. The role is, correctly, read as a satirical version of Francis Ford Coppola making Apocalypse Now, with extensive riffs on that film’s specific production mythology.

Park Chan-wook’s direction

Park Chan-wook, who directed three of the seven episodes (episodes one, three, and seven), brings his specific visual grammar to the show in ways that are formally surprising for HBO. Park’s camera moves with a kinetic, almost-musical specificity. His editing is unusually rhythmic for American prestige television. His willingness to stage set pieces in long takes, including a remarkable sequence in episode three set at a South Vietnamese general’s party, brings a specific cinematic register to a medium that usually dilutes it.

The other four episodes, directed by Fernando Meirelles and Marc Munden, work in Park’s established grammar without being his direct work. The transitions are visible but not disruptive.

Sandra Oh, stealing

Sandra Oh as Sofia Mori, the Captain’s lover and Japanese-American activist, is the show’s single best supporting performance. Oh, given actual dramatic material for the first time since Killing Eve, plays Sofia with a specific generational-American-Asian worldliness that the Captain is both attracted to and intimidated by. Their scenes together are the show’s emotional through-line.

The scene in episode four where Sofia explains to the Captain that she is not his community, she is not his political mirror, she is an American, is the season’s single most important piece of dialogue. Oh delivers it with a specific dignified exhaustion that is unforgettable.

Where the show lands

The Sympathizer is the specific prestige TV property that prestige-TV audiences do not automatically arrive at: seven episodes, subtitled where appropriate, formally non-linear, politically uncompromising, built around a lead performance from an unknown actor. HBO, to its credit, has not asked the show to be more accessible than it wanted to be.

A second season has not been announced. The novel has a companion (The Committed, 2021), which the show’s creators have said they would be interested in adapting if HBO renews.

Watch it across one weekend. Read the novel after. The show is genuinely better with the novel in your head, not because it needs the novel to make sense, but because the show’s specific interpretive choices become sharper once you can see what is being selected.