HBO’s latest miniseries, The Sympathizer, delves into the Vietnam War through a lens rarely seen in U.S. media, presenting a story soaked in the vivid hues of Vietnamese experience and perspective.
Created by Don McKellar and visionary South Korean film auteur Park Chan-wook (Oldboy, Decision to Leave), the eight-episode series adapts Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, offering a new perspective on the war’s historical impact.
When Park first encountered Nguyen’s novel, he was struck by its explosively expressive prose, which he described to Laura Zornosa at the Los Angeles Times as like watching fireworks — an experience he aimed to translate into the visual and narrative style of The Sympathizer.
Park, who also directed the first three episodes of the series, is known for blending stark humor with somber themes, a method he believes intensifies the emotional resonance of his films, reflecting the complex spectrum of human experiences.
“Believe it or not, I’m a director who puts significant importance in humor when I go about making a movie, because I believe — when the humor is combined with tragedy or violence — it actually makes it even more powerful,” Park relayed. “And that composite is what enables you to express in totality what a human being is, or what life is.”
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The Sympathizer centers on the life of The Captain, portrayed by Hoa Xuande. Born to a Vietnamese mother and a French priest, The Captain embodies Eastern and Western influences, reflecting the cultural and colonial complexities of Vietnam.
Robert Downey Jr. takes on multiple roles for the series, each embodying a different facet of American hegemony and stereotypes. Downey portrays characters like CIA agent Claude, the myopic Hollywood director known as The Auteur, and other symbolic figures that reflect “the melded faces of American imperialism and colonialism,” Zornosa writes.
This casting emphasizes the thematic exploration of identity and perception, showcasing Downey’s versatility, while critically examining the portrayal of historical narratives through a satirical lens.
Park was partially inspired by Stanley Kubrick, who did something similar with Peter Sellers in Dr. Strangelove, another Cold War-era political black comedy. “Our original novel’s intention was to have one and the same body having different faces,” he said.
This notion is pivotal, as the series explores themes of identity, the lasting impacts of colonialism, and the inherent contradictions within cultural understanding. Through The Captain’s eyes, viewers navigate the murky waters of allegiance and identity during and after the Vietnam War — or the American War, as it’s called in Vietnam — offering a multifaceted perspective that challenges conventional narratives.
The Sympathizer extends beyond the confines of the Vietnam War to reflect broader historical and cultural dilemmas. Through its detailed portrayal of characters and conflicts, the series highlights the persistent echoes of imperialism and cultural misunderstanding that resonate in contemporary global conflicts.
“When I was writing the book,” Nguyen notes, “it was always treating the war in Vietnam as an episode in a much longer history of American imperialism and colonialism.”
READ MORE: How the creators of HBO’s ‘The Sympathizer’ explore the ‘American War’ through a Vietnamese lens (Los Angeles Times)
Bringing The Sympathizer to the Small Screen
The Sympathizer is emblematic of a production greenlit ‟late in the era of so-called Peak TV,” Jia Tolentino writes for The New Yorker. She notes that the limited series ‟is the product of a marriage between two eminent tastemakers, A24 and HBO,” booked three years ago (pre-Discovery’s acquisition of the latter and industry contractions).
Tolentino writes that Park’s ‟gift for sumptuous spectacle [is] underpinned by meticulous preparation,” from detailed storyboarding and on-set precision.
Production required 120 days, and time on set with Park is ‟notoriously calm” and often marked by days that wrap early, per production designer Alec Hammond. However, this resulted in an economy of coverage. “There’s not a lot of latitude in the edit, which is not usual for television executives to see,” Don McKellar, Park’s co-showrunner for The Sympathizer, told Tolentino.
In general, Tolentino observes, ‟Making television is a more bureaucratic process than filmmaking, involving more input from more people on more footage.” (Perhaps Park’s infamous precision is one way to combat this tendency?)
For his part, Park ‟recognizes different constraints and opportunities,” Tolentino writes. However, he told her that “you can waste your time ‘like a millionaire wasting their abundant fortune’” when crafting a TV series. Instead, he aimed
‟not to waste ‘one second, one minute, or even a frame.’”
Nonetheless, Tolentino questions whether Park is perfectly suited to the small screen. She writes, ‟Television, though, may never be quite the right medium for a filmmaker who casts a spell that’s not meant to be broken, and who rewards the viewer through destabilization and discomfort.”
READ MORE: With “The Sympathizer,” the director of “Oldboy” and “The Handmaiden” comes to American television (The New Yorker)
“I tried very hard to make his colorful writing into a visual form,” Park told Salon senior critic Melanie McFarland during a Zoom interview, explaining his approach for the adaptation of Nguyen’s 2015 novel.
Additionally, Park ‟takes certain liberties with the story that invite new interpretations and meanings.”
For her part, McFarland wonders ‟whether parts of Nguyen’s story provided [Park with] a means of commenting on the audience’s tendency to revere certain filmmakers and excuse their excesses” (hallmarked by the portrayal of The Auteur); or is the series considering the work of a critic (one of Park’s prior careers)?
Park told her: ‟There’s some part of me that is very interested in that idea, and perhaps it has to do with my background as a critic too. But what is important for me whenever I go about making any kind of work is preserving the right amount of distance with the subject matter.”
He says that he seeks ‟to have the viewer be engaged in the story and alight with the protagonist and his emotional state.”
READ MORE: “Sometimes I would push away our audience”: “The Sympathizer” director Park Chan-wook feels for us (Salon)
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