The Sympathizer on HBO: A little Robert Downey Jr. goes a long way in the new show.
Slate“Wars never really die,” says a character in The Sympathizer, a new HBO series based on Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize–winning 2015 novel of the same title. “They just hold their breath.” Unlike the best-known American novels about the Vietnam War—Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers, Karl Marlantes’ Matterhorn—The Sympathizer begins as the war concludes, with the fall of Saigon in 1975. So is the square-jawed politician funneling money to the general’s delusional scheme to overthrow the new government back in Vietnam, and so is the volatile, gibberish-spouting film director who hires the Captain as a consultant on his Vietnam War movie. In Nguyen’s novel, the Captain’s sojourn through the movie business—a slicing satire of how American auteurs like Oliver Stone and Francis Ford Coppola depicted Vietnam and the Vietnamese—is one of the funniest parts of the book.
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