HBO's The Sympathizer Adaptation Never Reaches Its Full Potential

There’s an awful lot of pressure that comes with adapting an acclaimed novel for the screen, especially if it won the prestigious Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. HBO teams up with A24, the indie production company behind Beef and Euphoria, to take on that challenge with its small-screen take on The Sympathizer, the best-selling 2015 novel by Vietnamese-American academic and author Viet Thanh Nguyen. Revered South Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook, whose 2003 prison thriller Oldboy is said to have influenced Nguyen’s novel, leads the creative charge as co-creator, director, and writer alongside collaborator Don McKellar (Last Night), who is credited as co-showrunner and writer. 

The Sympathizer isn’t an easy story to do justice in seven one-hour episodes, as is the case here, and the limited series struggles at times to reach its full potential. Set at the tail-end of the Vietnam War, the subsequent events that unfold are told through the sole perspective of an unnamed narrator — sometimes an unreliable one — who’s only referred to as the Captain (Cowboy Bebop’s Hoa Xuande). After the fall of Saigon in 1975, he’s forced to escape to Los Angeles and settles into his new life within the refugee community. 

But that’s not even half of it: During this time, Captain has remained an undercover North Vietnam spy, selling secrets to the communist regime while remaining friendly to his new South Vietnamese expats. He also befriends a CIA agent, one of several cartoonish personas played by a nearly unrecognizable Robert Downey Jr. Captain is a walking contradiction, often facing a crisis of conscience about his dual identities (he’s half-Vietnamese and half-French), his cultural ideologies (he’s Vietnam-born but America-educated), opposing loyalties (both as a spy and a sympathizer), and where his allegiances ultimately lie. 

Nguyen’s novel is uniquely complicated in structure, weaving in and out of various points in Captain’s experiences and memories, and regularly utilizing flashbacks to fill in the full picture. The entire story, actually, could be considered one long flashback as The Sympathizer opens with Captain as a political prisoner back in North Vietnam, forcibly coerced to write a confession recounting everything that took place prior to his imprisonment and where his loyalties faltered. Chan-wook and McKellar try their best to recreate the novel’s nonlinear storytelling, but at times fall short of achieving the same effectiveness. Because the story jumps around often and spans years, even dating back to Captain’s earliest childhood memories, it occasionally requires significant brainpower on the part of the viewer to parse out where in the timeline the Captain is. It doesn’t help that certain memory jolts seem haphazardly placed.      

Like the novel, the adaptation is a hodgepodge of narrative genres, from dark comedy to spy thriller, political satire to war drama. The series tries to, once again, mimic the book’s elaborate rhythmic style, but the constant tonal shifts weaken the story’s overall cohesiveness. It’s a tricky balance capturing the right tone when dealing with weighty subject matter like an immigrant’s post-war experience and the series doesn’t quite figure it out. Certainly, The Sympathizer is at its strongest when the focus is squarely on Captain’s internal struggles and his tangled dynamics with his Vietnamese cohorts, such as his best friend Bon (Transplant’s Fred Nguyen Khan) and the General (Toan Le). 

If anyone is poised to be the series's breakout star, it's Xuande, whose biggest credit prior to The Sympathizer was a recurring part in Netflix’s Cowboy Bebop, where he played one-half of a sibling assassin duo. His deft ability to dance between his character’s conflicting moralities, alliances, and sense of identity adds depth, complexity, and empathy to his unenviable circumstances.

Xuande, who is Vietnamese Australian, carries The Sympathizer on his back — impressively expressing the turmoil his character endures at crucial junctures with excruciating emotion, at other times charming his way through a crowd with his intellect, and being sardonically funny when it calls for it. The role also requires him to be able to switch from English to Vietnamese and vice versa, which he does seamlessly. Xuande also holds his own opposite seasoned pros Sandra Oh, who is unsurprisingly superb as feminist college secretary and fling Ms. Mori, and Downey Jr., who chews up every scene he’s in.

It’s Downey Jr.’s role, or more accurately roles, that injects levity and absurdity to the whole piece. Fresh off his Oscar win for Oppenheimer, Downey Jr. transforms multiple times over for The Sympathizer; each of the four distinct characters he inhabits — a CIA handler, professor, congressman, and film director, the latter his most fitting role — is meant to represent all that is farcical and hypocritical about Western society. There are moments, though, where it feels as if he’s landed on a completely different show. A scene in the third episode, which features Xuande ping-ponging between four RDJs at a fancy dinner, is about as ridiculous as it gets. Credit needs to be given to the makeup, hair, and prosthetics teams for creating wildly believable guises for Downey Jr. to play with. 

The strongest and most intriguing arc happens midway through the series, in the episodes that confront and satirize Hollywood’s bastardization of the Vietnam War in popular media, such as past films like Apocalypse Now. In The Sympathizer, Captain is hired to consult on a major movie production about the Vietnam War (he believes he’s been brought on to give voice to the Vietnamese side), but it soon dawns on him that he’s merely a pawn — there to service the romanticized American portrayal of the war.

To say the film set is a disaster is an understatement. Cultural sensitivities and inaccuracies Captain is brought in to address or correct are mishandled (a woman playing Vietnamese is actually Chinese; she’s told to make the dialogue “sound like Vietnamese”) or brushed off. In one scene, Captain bribes the Vietnamese actors with money to be okay with playing the “animals” who murdered their family members. There are also a few surprise cameos that won’t be spoiled here.

While The Sympathizer does its best to live up to the source material, it fails to meet the achievement of Nguyen’s award-winning novel. Any adaptation was always going to face massive challenges trying to get as structurally, tonally, and thematically close to the book due to its unique storytelling approach. “I’m whatever I need to be, just like you,” one of Downey Jr.’s characters tells Captain. Unfortunately, what The Sympathizer needed was to be great, but it's simply satisfactory.

The Sympathizer premieres April 14 at 9:00 P.M. ET on HBO and will stream on Max. Join the discussion about the show in our forums.

Philiana Ng is a Los Angeles-based writer covering TV, celebrity, culture and more. Her work has appeared in The Hollywood Reporter, Billboard, Entertainment Tonight, TV Guide, Yahoo Entertainment, and The Daily Beast, among others.