Mocking Asian representation in Hollywood, the HBO miniseries casts Robert Downey Jr. as (almost) every one of its one-dimensional villains.
Hoa Xuande is the unnamed central character in the HBO limited series “The Sympathizer,” which premieres April 14. Viet Thanh Nguyen’s 2015 novel
The Captain doesn’t. Instead, he writes the following lines: “I am a spy. A sleeper. A spook. A man with two faces. I was cursed to see every issue from both sides. I was a Communist agent implanted in the South.” It is, whether he understands it or not, a small act of rebellion.
Xuande does heroic work anchoring these competing tones and humanizing the slightly schematic nest of contradictions slowly paralyzing his character. The Captain, we are told , is a double agent in more than one sense. Half-Vietnamese and half-French, he was cruelly rejected by the Eastern and Western worlds he must nevertheless master and learn to navigate. After his mother dies, his only real remaining bond is to his two childhood best friends, Bon and Man. Bon fights for the South.
At its best, the show defies expectations from a peculiar angle, lapsing into anticlimax where we expect shock or catharsis and vice versa. At its least surprising, it declares an explicit intention to reframe: “In America it is called the Vietnam War. In Vietnam it is called the American War,” the opening text reads.
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