DOWNEY ROLE CALL
Oscar winner plays multiple parts in ‘The Sympathizer’
IN the new HBO limited series “The Sympathizer,” starring Robert Downey Jr., a North Vietnamese mole in the South Vietnamese secret police continues to spy on his countrymen after the fall of Saigon, when he has joined the South Vietnamese in LA. Believe it or not, it’s actually a dark comedy.
As the series opens, a man in a prison cell is told to rewrite his confession, and not to leave out any detail. “Comrade, everything I did was to advance the cause,” says the prisoner, before he starts to write down his confession one more time. Cut to Saigon, Winter 1975, four months before it fell to the Viet Cong. The prisoner, known as the Captain (Hoa Xuande) is meeting his CIA handler Claude Downey Jr. at a movie theater setting up big displays for the film “Death Wish.” Inside, South Vietnamese intelligence officers are questioning a woman caught with a roll of film that has sensitive information about their side. During the questioning, the General (Toan Le), the leader of the secret police, enters the theater. If Claude helped the Captain learn the ways of American pop culture, the General helped him learn the ways of the South Vietnamese. What neither man knows, of course, is that the Captain is a mole for the North Vietnamese. He’s the one who shot the film the woman that’s being questioned was found with. Captain’s liaison to the North is his childhood friend Man (Duy Nguyen); the two of them regularly hang out with their other childhood friend Bon (Fred Nguyen Khan), who is an officer for the South’s Airborne division. Bon and his wife just had a baby, who is Captain’s godson. What was on the film was a list of every member of the secret police, including Captain, so the North would know who needed reeducation when they took over.
Downey Jr. is set to play multiple roles in the series, which may or may not be a distraction. As Claude in the first episode, Downey acted like a cross between James Caan and Hunter S. Thompson; his character even claimed that he was 1/16 black. We wonder if the “Where’s Waldo?” aspect of Downey in multiple roles will take away from this story.
As the North pushes towards Saigon and the prospect of escaping to the US gets closer, the General asks Captain to go through the list to see who stays and who can get on the plane Claude has been able to procure. Given the failure to retrieve the film Captain shot, it’s ironic that the hard copy of the list is now in his hands; he of course gives a copy to Man. This is when Man tells Captain that he’s going to the
US with the General and his family.
Captain, who is half-French and went to college in the States, has an affinity for the country, and the North knows it.
Created by Park Chan-wook and Don McKellar based on Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel of the same name, “The Sympathizer” has a bit of the darkly comedic feel of shows like
“Hunters” crossed with more modern-set series like “The Brothers Sun.”
The first episode of “The Sympathizer” doesn’t quite give viewers an indication of just how strange and twisted the story of the Captain is going to get. The Captain will settle in LA along with the rest of the South Vietnamese families that happened to escape Saigon as it fell, but will still be spying on them for his comrades back home. Like other shows that are curplace rently taking in this time period — the 1969-set “Palm Royale,” for inthere’s stance, going to be a lot of quirky characters, a lot of stylistic filmmaking techniques used. We just hope that “The Sympathizer” doesn’t get distracted by its gimmicks and focuses on Captain’s story.