TV Review – The Sympathizer

The Sympathizer (2024)
Written by Park Chan-wook, Don McKellar, Naomi Iizuka, Mark Richard, Maegan Houang, and Anchuli Felicia King
Directed by Park Chan-wook, Fernando Meirelles, and Marc Munden

The portrayal of communism in Western media is fraught with contradiction. It has to be because to honestly present communism would mean capitalism would be critiqued in detail. Part of the ongoing American imperialist project is ensuring no cogent critiques of the dominant economic system happen. This means when communism is presented, it is always a brutal internment camp where people are tortured. This disregards the fact the United States has and continues to operate brutal internment camps where people are tortured. It seems that this behavior isn’t inherent to communism but something people seem to do regardless of the economic system they live under. While The Sympathizer starts out strong, its lead director steps aside three episodes in, and a very neoliberal centrist viewpoint leaves it as an imperfect creation.

Based on the Pulitzer-winning novel by Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer is told from the point of view of The Captain (Hoa Xuande), a half-Vietnamese, half-French police captain in Saigon during the War. He’s secretly working as a double agent for the Communists in the north and must participate in brutal interrogations of his comrades to ensure the capitalists trust him. 

Eventually, Saigon falls, and The Captain is told by his superiors in the north to emigrate to the States so he can keep an eye on those Vietnamese who collaborated with the Americans. His loyalties to his deeply held communist beliefs clash with his sentiments for his fellow refugees, and he finds himself backed into a challenging corner. The Captain will eventually return to his homeland but under dire circumstances. The book and mini-series are how he ended up back there.

The first three episodes of The Sympathizer are absolutely fantastic. Unsurprisingly, these are the only ones directed by South Korean master Park Chan-wook. That doesn’t mean the other four are terrible; their flaws are made more evident because they come after three hours of gorgeous cinematography and such brilliant blocking. Fernando Meirelles and Marc Munden are fine directors; I personally love Munden’s work on the underrated British series Utopia. But they are not in the same league as Park. The director brings the same level of energy & editing to this project that he does for all his films. That loss of momentum does sometimes make the second half of the mini-series a little more of a slog.

One of the things the mini-series gets right is its use of language. There is a lot of spoken Vietnamese here, and I liked that they did that instead of having these characters switch to English when they arrived in the States. When a character chooses to speak Vietnamese over English, it also plays a crucial role in several plot points. There are many palpably tense moments during The Captain’s time in the U.S. as he attempts to conceal his double agent role. This leads to him murdering people, and the show doesn’t shy away from the horrible impact that it has on a person.

Park plays with structure in his episodes, especially the first one, jumping back and forth in time as The Captain explains in voice-over what is going on. The series, up to the final episode, is book-ended with The Captain in a Vietnamese internment camp where he’s being made to write a confession of everything that happened to him when he left. There’s a nasty torture sequence where The Captain has to hold back his emotions as one of his comrades is savaged by the South Vietnamese collaborators. The way these sequences are shot and blocked feels like a Park Chan-wook film, which is why the shift in directors causes the series to become incredibly disjointed in the second half.

Robert Downey Junior is one of the weaker links in the whole affair. He plays multiple roles, with one scene at a restaurant featuring them all together. I immediately thought of Eddie Murphy’s The Klumps as the camera panned around the table to show Downey in all his “flavors.” I don’t really see what he added to the show other than a way for him to show off different accents and postures. My MVP was Toan Le as The General, our protagonist’s boss. This character added a lot of humor and tension to the story: a short-fused guy who The Captain is constantly walking around on eggshells. 

The end result feels incredibly messy. The revelations in the final episode that we’re supposed to be shocked about fell pretty flat for me. It felt like a story that had to pivot to the center to wag its finger and say, “Both sides are so bad, right guys?” The one thing about communism, as portrayed in Western media, is that they will never show you the millions of people lifted out of medieval-level poverty. Again, if all you show me about communist countries is how they imprison and are cruel to people, I can point to the United States and say that doesn’t sound like a communist issue then. The result is a conclusion that feels very ambivalent and thus undercuts a lot of the first few episodes.