Summary
Don’t let the muddled tone and much-advertised presence of Robert Downey Jr. fool you – The Sympathizer is a serious drama that is pulling no punches.
The surface-level appeal of The Sympathizer is Robert Downey Jr., making his limited series debut while slathered in makeup and a hairpiece that makes him look like a sunbed salesman. But it’s a trick. Episode 1, “Death Wish”, features Downey Jr. quite a bit, but it ends with a massacre and sneaks plentiful scenes of torture in for good measure.
And that’s the point. The Sympathizer is about The Fall of Saigon, the event that marked the end of the Vietnam War – or the American War, as it’s known in Vietnam – and the demolition of the South Vietnamese state. It’s prestige TV about one of the bloodiest and most needless conflicts in world history.
A marquee star gets you in the door. The rest keeps you from leaving.
The Fall of Saigon and Operation Frequent Wind
Based on Viet Thanh Nguyen’s award-winning novel, the premiere episode is largely an introduction to the plight of the Captain (Hoa Xuande), a Viet Cong double agent embedded in the South Vietnamese Army in 1975 (and potentially based on a real spy). A muddle of contradictions, the Captain is half Vietnamese, half French, studied in the U.S., and speaks perfect English. He doesn’t fit anywhere and is cursed to see both sides of every issue.
The Captain’s superiors, the General (Toan Le) and CIA agent Claude (Downey Jr.), have no idea he’s a spy. At the time, the U.S. was aiding the South Vietnamese, but the American public was staunchly against the war. When the cost of American lives became too great to rationalize, the Americans pulled out of Vietnam and Saigon fell to the North.
As something of a consolation effort for leaving them to it, the U.S. backed an evacuation mission named Operation Frequent Wind, which spirited more than 7000 South Vietnamese citizens out of Saigon. In this story, the Captain is one of them, still – as a communist sympathizer – harboring loyalty to the Viet Cong.
The Sympathizer Is Deliberately Ridiculous
The Sympathizer Episode 1
But it takes the full hour to get to this point. Most of “Death Wish” is designed to provide context by laying out the political state of South Vietnam and the Captain’s complex position in the hierarchy, forcing him into some tough spots to emphasize the difficulty of his predicament.
How The Sympathizer depicts these tough spots is telling. A big one is the capture and interrogation (read: torture) of a communist sympathizer who apparently swallowed a role of microfilm. The Captain has to play along to maintain his cover. But the show laces the sequence with dark comedy and meta references to the functions of film in general (the initial interrogation takes place in a movie theater where the titular Death Wish is playing; the woman is spotlit on stage.)
This juxtaposition gives The Sympathizer an eerie quality. Downey’s Claude is the same. The CIA man – one of several antagonists the Iron Man star will play throughout the series – looks ridiculous. We’re supposed, I think, to laugh at him, at the absurdity of a treasured American actor playing this arch role in a serious drama. His cartoonish demeanor doesn’t sit well with the horrors he’s privy to. The awkwardness is intentional.
The Curse Of Seeing Both Sides
The Sympathizer Episode 1
The microfilm pertains to a staff list of the South’s Secret Police that the Captain had stolen a couple of days earlier from a cabinet in the General’s office. The Captain lives with the General and teaches his daughter English, so he’s uncomfortably close to the top of the South Vietnamese regime. If he’d waited, he’d have been given the list anyway, since the General wants him to choose which of the men gets to occupy coveted spots aboard the C-130 evacuation plane during Operation Frequent Wind.
Another predicament. If the Captain takes the best men, he won’t be leaving anyone behind who’s worth a damn. But if he takes the worst men, the General will be suspicious. So, he picks the worst men who appear to be the best. He also uses his personal relationship with the general to request seats for his friend Bon (Fred Nguyen Khan) and Bon’s family.
Bon is an interesting figure in the Captain’s personal story since he hates the Viet Cong but the Captain’s fondness for him is very genuine. Maybe seeing both sides of every issue really is a curse.
The Captain Gets His Real Orders
The Sympathizer Episode 1
The Captain has a fanciful idea of staying behind during the evacuation and bidding the General farewell. But his orders from the North – passed down to him by a doctor named Man (Duy Nguy?n) – is to accompany the General abroad and keep an eye on him.
That’s your setup for the rest of the season – the Captain in a South Vietnamese refugee community, trying to keep his double-agent status a secret while feeding information back to the Viet Cong.
To make the stakes clear, the Viet Cong bomb the escapees during Operation Frequent Wind in a flurry of questionable CGI explosions. Bon’s wife and child are killed in the hellfire, while the Captain helps Bon and the General to escape.
As if he didn’t have a reason to keep his true nature a secret before, he certainly does now.
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