The Sympathizer, review: A stunning and subversive take on the Vietnam War
Apologies for that ‘z’ in Sympathizer, but sometimes you just can’t win the war against cultural appropriation, so the American spelling it is. Which is a pretty good jumping-off point for a complex and deeply moving drama that may well shift your perspective on the Vietnam War. Because in Vietnam, it was called the American War.
Based on Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Sympathizer (Sky Atlantic) is a blood brother to Deutschland 83 in the way it cannily flips historical viewpoints with a darkly comedic eye. Where Deutschland’s Martin struggled with an identity crisis as an East German spy in liberated Berlin, in The Sympathizer we follow a North Vietnamese double agent, known only as the Captain, as America threatens to seep into his bones. “You think in English now,” he’s taunted at a re-education camp when he returns to his homeland.
Relative unknown Hoa Xuande is outstanding in the anchor role of the Captain, deployed on an undercover mission in the USA after the fall of Saigon. Unknowable yet empathetic, charming yet distant, there’s a lot hidden behind the Captain’s implacable gaze, his soft yet steely grey eyes forever observing, never quite inside the action.
And there’s a lot of action. Robert Downey Jr has a scenery-chewing ball in a quartet of roles designed to illustrate the pervasive influence of American culture and politics. It’s a piece of stunt casting that occasionally overeggs the satire, but that caveat is overturned by his performance as egomaniac film director Niko Damianas in an episode, the best of the seven, that hilariously puts Hollywood’s penchant for cultural appropriation to the sword in a mickey-take of Apocalypse Now and its ilk.
By turns horrific and hilarious, and with an engagingly subversive undertow – if you did a drinking game based on the many and various uses of a Coca-Cola can, you wouldn’t make it past episode three – there’s a hidden depth to The Sympathizer that belies its occasionally larky mask. But its central theme, the question of identity and where we truly belong, is as much about the here and now as it is about Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s.
Be on your guard: the ending sneaks up like a sniper in the jungle as the Captain, having survived the worst both sides can throw at him, ponders his future. You realise how little we know this man, yet how much his uncertainties echo ours, the emotional sucker punch resonating long after the credits roll.
The Sympathizer is available to watch on Now/Sky Go and airs on Sky Atlantic at 9pm on Monday 27 May