At the exact midpoint of HBO's animated adaptation of “The Sympathizers,” there's a brief moment where the show's recurring flaws really resolve themselves. Its fourth episode documents the filming of a movie within the story. Like the Pulitzer Prize-winning Viet Thanh Nguyen novel of the same name on which the miniseries is based, this fictional Hollywood production is very similar to Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 Vietnam War epic Apocalypse Now. There is. The unnamed protagonist of this novel and series is an advisor on a film directed by a capricious white male filmmaker known simply as “The Director.”
Ostensibly, our protagonist (known to most of those around him as a former captain in the South Vietnamese army, now living in the United States as a refugee) is a fan of the movie and its depiction of Vietnamese characters. We're there to make sure we're culturally sensitive. But at best, he's there to defuse the really racist stuff. (And most of the time, his attempts to course correct are completely futile.)
This episode deviates from the book in several ways, including someone placing a bloody deer head on someone else's bed. It's an obvious nod to “The Godfather,” but it's also a little on-the-nose.
This lack of subtlety and pushing the bar a step too far sums up the most frustrating shortcomings of the seven-episode limited series, which premieres Sunday night. Adapted by Park Chan-wook and Don McKellar, the drama is itself a stylish, impressively shot and well-acted spy thriller about the travails of its protagonist, who is secretly a communist agent. There is.
But crucially, the series has lost its book weight and its sharp edges have been sanded down. Its elements of modern satire are impenetrable, and the novel's scathing commentary on who gets to tell stories about war, and how it is too often flattened, is largely forgotten and in fact Only that one episode is explored.
To put it more bluntly, this book understands that its readers are smart. But the series seems to think we can't be trusted to put everything together ourselves.
Visually, you can't help but be immediately drawn in by the show's originalistic touches. Each episode begins with the familiar HBO static logo, but stylistically a preview of what's to come, the shot zooms in on an “O” to form part of a scrolling reel of film. Masu. There are plenty of visual references to 1970s films, including Coppola's films as well as Martin Scorsese's “Taxi Driver.”
Hua Xuande, best known for his recurring role in Netflix's live-action “Cowboy Bebop” series, serves as the show's breakout star as the protagonist, known only as Captain. He is surrounded by a fine supporting ensemble, including Toan Li as his superior, the General. Fred Nguyen Khanh plays his childhood friend Bong. and Vi Le as the general's daughter Lana. Familiar faces also pop in and out of the series, including Sandra Oh, who is wonderful as always. And you can even do the “Leo Pointing” meme by watching the actors in the movie during the show, adding to the meta quality of that storyline.
And Robert Downey Jr. is also a typical example. Many of the ads for the series have emphasized the fact that the new Oscar winner is playing multiple roles. A racist, mansplaining “Oriental Studies” professor. He is a Republican whose main campaign pillar is pandering to the Vietnamese refugee community by promoting opposition to communism. Downey's truly gonzo performance is a fun commentary on the interchangeability of these white men, who in many ways represent the colonizer.
On a practical and mercenary level, his star power likely contributed to the series' creation. (He also serves as an executive producer.) But after a few episodes, his stunt casting becomes distracting and even a little frustrating.
Such maximalism hampers the series at every turn. Now that you get the point, the show explains it again in case you didn't get it the first time. A lot of this book is all about how the main character struggles with dual identities in his life and how he doesn't fit in anywhere. He is the “bastard'' child of a Vietnamese woman and a French priest. He is simultaneously on both sides of the Vietnam War, being accepted into the American political establishment as an anti-communist fighter, while secretly passing information back to his childhood best friend named Mann, a communist operative.
When he arrives in America as a refugee, he is conflicted because he feels that while he is not Vietnamese, he is also not fully American. All such expressions of duality are unique to this book. However, in the story, it is often spelled out with a heavy hand.
It may be a cliché to say this about an acclaimed novel, but much of what makes this book a page turner is the text itself. This is especially true of the interiority of novels, which are difficult to convey on screen without cutting back and forth with dialogue and visual cues. And much of this book is about the written word. Case in point: A component of both this book and the series is a written confession from the protagonist, which can be trickier to convey than conveying visually on a page.
This is not the place to rehash the eternal question of whether a particular book is not adaptable. The reason for the existence of the book and its movie version is different. There are many ways to approach the adaptation process, but they don't fall into a simple binary of being true to the source material or not.
One of the central discussions in this series is awareness. More people will be exposed to the story of “The Sympathizer” through his HBO show than through his novels. And in an age when Hollywood conglomerates are spitting out existing IP and trying to squeeze every last drop out of a lemon that withered long ago, acclaimed Asian American authors are better off than rebooting old series, for example. It's definitely creatively fresher to adapt the groundbreaking novel of . Shoehorned in some surface level variety.
At the same time, it's disappointing when the result strips away much of the character of the source material. There is a bitter irony in the adaptation of Nguyen's book. This is a novel about how the stories of war we collectively tell are far more complex than the wars between the two sides, and how they are routinely watered down, and that It is itself being watered down. But that's Hollywood for you.
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