Gettin' My Eps In: The Sympathizer E4
Just one TV review this week, but it covers an episode that I think is a really good one.
The Sympathizer
Episode 4: “Give Us Some Good Lines”
Written by Don McKellar and Park Chan-Wook
Directed by Fernando Meirelles
Streaming on Max
The idea of authenticity is the focus of this episode of The Sympathizer, as it features our hero, The Captain (Hoa Xuande), acting as a cultural consultant on a Vietnam War movie. He’s there to try to provide some authenticity to the production, but he’s struggling to figure out his own authenticity as a guy being pulled in multiple different directions by everyone in his life. It’s uncertain whether his loyalty to his home country (and specifically the Communist regime that has now taken over), his desire to protect the people he cares about, his sense of doing what’s right, or his continuing guilt about his actions will prevail as he’s at war with himself. Is there an authentic Captain, or has he constructed a facade with nothing underneath?
The movie is directed by one of Robert Downey, Jr.’s characters in this series, and he’s pretty hilarious as a guy who claims that he’s doing something important but is really caught up in his own self-aggrandizing bullshit. Early on, The Captain confronts him about the fact that none of the Vietnamese characters in the movie have any lines, and he provides all sorts of ridiculous reasons why that doesn’t matter, including claiming that he didn’t want there to be any dialogue in the movie but had to change that plan due to studio pressure. So, you see, by keeping the Vietnamese characters silent, they’re the most truly authentic representations of his vision! And anyway, who is The Captain to question his artistic approach?
Much of this posturing falls apart once the movie starts filming. The extras that they’ve hired are Chinese, not Vietnamese, and The Captain rightly points out that even if their dialogue is limited to lines like “No, don’t shoot!” they should still be speaking the right language. An amazingly insensitive production assistant asks if an old woman playing a villager can just speak in a different accent, and she replies, “Can you speak Danish?”
Downey can’t handle this, so he gives the assistant 48 hours to hire a new set of Vietnamese extras. The Captain decides to help out, getting in touch with The General to get a bunch of people from the Vietnamese refugee community to join them and play the put-upon villagers. Then, he gives them pro-Communist dialogue, trying to smuggle his own message into the movie, since the Americans won’t know the difference. Except this doesn’t work out so well either, since the refugees aren’t too happy about saying anything positive about the Viet Cong who killed their families during the war and forced them to evacuate the country.
Other questions about authenticity come up during filming due to the different approaches taken by the actors. David Duchovny plays a guy who is known for method acting, meaning that he always stays in character as a grizzled, angry military man. However, this mostly gives him a chance to act aggressive with everyone else and spout racial slurs at every opportunity, which seems like his real self coming through. On the other end of the spectrum is Maxwell Whittington-Cooper as a young, popular soul singer who is dabbling in acting. He seems to be more interested in pursuing The General’s Daughter Lana (Vy Le), who has tagged along with The Captain to get a starry-eyed look at a Hollywood production. Despite The Captain’s best efforts, she manages to insinuate herself into the production, first appearing as an extra and then securing a more substantial role as a key victim of the brutality of the American soldiers.
Interestingly, The Captain gets a bit starry-eyed himself by the presence of John Cho as an actor who gets roles as the generic Asian guy in lots of movies. He’s managed to be killed over and over again by actors ranging from Robert Mitchum to Frank Sinatra. Here, he plays an American soldier who gets captured by the Viet Cong and tortured in a scene that ends up being too authentic for The Captain, since it dredges up memories of the young woman spy who he saw interrogated in the first episode of the series.
All of this makes for a fascinating mix, with layers upon layers of artifice and personas being piled on top of each other. The Captain doesn’t make things any easier for himself when he asks for his own mother’s name to be added to a prop tombstone, giving him a chance to recognize her at least a little bit when she’s really in an unmarked grave somewhere in the jungles of Vietnam. But when Downey seizes on that name, gives it to Lana’s character, and subjects her to torment by the American soldiers, it becomes an all-too-real reminder for The Captain of what he, his people, and his country have experienced. Everything that’s happening becomes too much for him to bear, and he starts having trouble separating the roles the actors are playing from what’s going on behind the scenes and the actions he has taken in his various personas. Who knows how long he’ll be able to continue navigating this system or whether he’ll end up coming apart, giving himself away as a double agent, and completely destroying his chances of succeeding in his mission (which seems less and less understandable by the moment).
There’s so much going on in this series and so many layers of intrigue that it can seem hard to keep up, but it certainly helps that everything is incredibly entertaining. While the previous episodes had all been directed by Park Chan-Wook, this one is helmed by Fernando Meirelles, director of the great movie City of God. He follows much of the same style that has been established, keeping things moving quickly and making some jarring jump cuts that transition suddenly between different scenes. It keeps viewers on their toes, making us feel as unsettled as The Captain. The show continues to be great, offering not only a fascinating character study but a continuing look at the exploitative nature of American culture and the difficulty of maintaining authenticity in the midst of an ongoing assault on everything that matters to a person. With three episodes to go, I’m going to be eagerly anticipating the moments I get to spend in this increasingly frenetic milieu.