HBO's Stylish Adaptation Of 'The Sympathizer' Is A Watered-Down Version Of The Book

Theres a brief moment at just about the midpoint of HBOs adaptation of The Sympathizer when the shows recurring flaw really settles in. Its fourth episode chronicles the filming of a movie within the story. Like in the miniseries source material Viet Thanh Nguyens Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name this fictional Hollywood production bears a strong resemblance to Francis Ford Coppolas 1979 Vietnam War epic, Apocalypse Now. The novel and series unnamed protagonist is an adviser on the movie, directed by a volatile white male filmmaker simply called the Auteur.

Ostensibly, our protagonist known to most people around him as an ex-captain in the South Vietnamese army, now living in the U.S. as a refugee is there to make sure that the film and its portrayals of Vietnamese characters are culturally sensitive. But at best, hes really there to try to temper anything super racist. (And for the most part, his attempts at course correction are utterly futile.)

The episode departs from the book in several ways, including when someone places a deers bloody head in another persons bed. Its a clear nod to The Godfather and a bit too on the nose.

That lack of subtlety and taking a reference one step too far sum up the most frustrating shortcoming of the seven-episode limited series, which premieres Sunday night. Adapted by Park Chan-wook and Don McKellar, the show on its own is a stylish, impressively shot and well-acted spy thriller following the travails of the protagonist, who is secretly a communist agent.

But crucially, the series loses the heft of the book, sanding down its sharp edges. Elements of its mordant satire dont cut through, and the novels searing commentary on who gets to tell stories about war and how theyre too often flattened is largely forgotten, only really explored in that one episode.

To put it more bluntly, the book understands that the audience is smart. The series, however, seems to think that we cant be trusted to piece everything together ourselves.

Visually, its hard not to be immediately drawn in by the shows auteurist touches. Each episode opens with the familiar HBO static logo but in a preview of whats to come stylistically, the shot zooms in on the O to form part of a scrolling film reel. Theres a wealth of visual references to movies of the 1970s, including not only Coppolas films but also Martin Scorseses Taxi Driver.

As the protagonist, referred to only as the Captain, Hoa Xuande best known for a recurring role on Netflix s live-action Cowboy Bebop series carries the show as its breakout star. Around him, theres a wonderful ensemble of supporting players, including Toan Le as his boss, the General; Fred Nguyen Khan as his childhood friend Bon; and Vy Le as Lana, the Generals daughter. Familiar faces also pop in and out of the series, like Sandra Oh, who is fantastic as always. And you might do the Leo pointing meme  upon seeing the actors who appear in the movie within the show, adding to the meta quality of that storyline.

Then theres the Robert Downey Jr. of it all. Much of the advertising for the series has highlighted the fact that the newly minted Oscar winner portrays multiple roles: several of the white men in the protagonists life, including a CIA agent and ally of the General; a racist and mansplaining Oriental studies professor; and a Republican congressman whose main campaign pitch involves pandering to the Vietnamese refugee community by touting his opposition to communism. Downeys truly gonzo performance is a fun commentary on the interchangeability of these white men, all of whom represent the colonizer in various forms.

On a practical and mercenary level, his star power likely helped the series get made. (He also serves as an executive producer.) But after a few episodes, his stunt casting becomes distracting and even a bit grating.

That kind of maximalism hampers the series at every turn. Just when youve gotten the point, the show hits it again, in case it wasnt clear the first time. Much of the book concerns all of the ways that the protagonist is grappling with dual identities in his life and how he never quite fits in anywhere. Hes the biracial bastard child of a Vietnamese woman and a French priest. Hes on both sides of the Vietnam War simultaneously, embraced by the American political establishment as an anticommunist fighter while secretly sending information back to a childhood best friend named Man, a communist operative.

Upon arriving in America as a refugee, he struggles with feeling not Vietnamese enough but not quite American either. All of those representations of duality are inherent to the book. But in the series, theyre often spelled out with too heavy a hand.

Maybe its a clich to say this about an acclaimed novel, but so much of what makes the book a page turner is the text itself. This is especially true of the novels interiority, which is hard to capture on-screen without being blunt in the dialogue and visual cues. And so much of the book is about the written word. Case in point: The framing device of both the book and the series is a written confession from the protagonist, which can be clunkier to convey visually than on the page.

This isnt the place to rehash the perennial question of whether certain books are unadaptable. Books and their screen versions have different reasons for existing. There are so many ways to approach the adaptation process that dont fall into a simple binary of remaining faithful to the original material or not.

One central argument for this series is visibility: More people are likely going to encounter the story of The Sympathizer through the HBO show than the novel. And in our age of Hollywood conglomerates regurgitating existing IP and trying to squeeze every drop out of lemons that went dry long ago, its undoubtedly more creatively fresh to adapt a groundbreaking novel from an acclaimed Asian American author than to, say, reboot an old franchise and shoehorn in some surface-level diversity.

At the same time, its disappointing when the result strips away a lot of what makes the source material distinctive. Theres a biting irony in an adaptation of Nguyens book a novel about how the stories we collectively tell about wars are far more complicated than two sides, and how they routinely get watered-down being itself watered-down. But thats Hollywood for you.

The Sympathizer premieres Sunday, April 14 on HBO.