‘The Sympathizer’ follows Robert Downey Jr. down the rabbit hole of the Vietnam War

‘The Sympathizer’ follows Robert Downey Jr. down the rabbit hole of the Vietnam War

It’s fortuitous timing to have a series produced by and featuring newly minted Oscar winner Robert Downey Jr. falls down a very strange rabbit hole in “The Sympathizer,” a satirical look at the Vietnam War and its aftermath. Playing no less than four roles, Downey represents some ugly Americans, but the series becomes a narrative slum and, despite its great moments, cannot consistently pull itself together.

Directed in part by acclaimed South Korean filmmaker Park Chan wook  Old boy Decision to Leave who oversees the show with writer Don McKellar, the seven-episode limited series is adapted from the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Viet Thanh Nguyen. . Each episode begins with seemingly dated credits that evoke the 1970s, a promising Quentin Tarantino conceit that, given what follows, sets expectations too high.

Told in flashbacks, and often rewound to fill in details, the story focuses on the Captain (Hoa Xuande), a half-Vietnamese, half-French secret police officer who secretly works for North Vietnam against American-backed forces. government.

The Captain’s lineage, and his double life, is emblematic of a man torn in different directions, including his relationship with two inseparable friends (played by Duy Nguyen and Fred Nguyen Khan). As constructed, it’s a rather heavy-handed approximation of Vietnam’s fate in the tug of war, which doesn’t make the Captain’s increasingly real arc any more interesting.

That’s because the protagonist relates his story to a Vietnamese investigator, recounting a journey that includes the fall of Saigon, his escape from the country – in what must be the show’s most harrowing sequence – and his curious adventure in the US.

For Downey, his various guises include everything from a CIA agent to a deranged film director, a device that proves every bit as gimmicky, and largely unnecessary, as it sounds. The net effect is less Peter Sellers in “Dr. Strangelove,” assuming that’s the intent, than a way to maximize the star’s presence without actually increasing the impact.

The Captain’s journey also brings him into contact with an American colleague (Sandra Oh) whose experience dealing with their racist boss comes in handy, and in perhaps the strangest detour, to a film set where he serves as a technical consultant, subject to desire. the aforementioned director Downey and a crazy method actor (David Duchovny).

“The Sympathizer” isn’t the first project to channel the contradictions of the Vietnam War through an exaggerated lens (“Apocalypse Now” being a prime example), but except for a few bracing sequences, the execution only obscures that vision. The high bar for balancing a satirical tone seems particularly noteworthy after “The Regime,” another great HBO production that also proves to be too cute and shy for its own good.

Credit Downey with leveraging his commercial clout to champion such challenging material and attract marquee international directors to American television, but in the final analysis, “The Sympathizer” plays like the latest example of pampering a star’s pet project.

While there is an obvious rationale for that strategy in the attention-oriented realm of premium TV, since the series doesn’t match the promise of the high-profile elements it would suggest, sympathy isn’t one of them.