Adapting a book into a film or television series is about making choices. What needs to happen to turn words into visual drama? What gets excised, expanded on, tweaked, streamlined? The goal isn’t faithfulness; what we see on the screen must stand on its own and succeed on its own terms. The worst adaptations play like filmed books, hamstrung by fealty. The good ones, including showrunners Park Chan-wook and Don McKellar’s limited series based on Viet Thanh Nguyen’s 2015 novel, The Sympathizer, add something new to the conversation. Ideally, they make up for what they can’t convey—an author’s voice, in this case dry and deeply ironic—with visual language that print can’t conjure.
Television isn’t a director’s medium; a writers’ room places a lot of cooks in the creative kitchen, and most series use a stable of directors tasked with carrying out the vision of the hive and the showrunner. The Sympathizer is unusual in that Park was not just a series cocreator but also the director of the first three episodes. These episodes in particular (the best of the series) reflect his authorial voice, resonating with sardonically vivid flourishes, as much as Nguyen’s. He leaves his mark from the start, with a grainy introduction that offers, in the manner of a public school instructional film, a rudimentary explanation of the Vietnam War (“It was a bloody war between the North, led by the communists who defeated Vietnam’s long-time French colonizers…”).
Here, the series is already interrogating the official story or commenting on its futility. This is followed almost immediately by an actual interrogation sequence set in a Saigon movie theater showing Death Wish (which is also the name of this first episode). We see a massive cutout of that vigilante movie’s star, Charles Bronson, being lifted toward the marquee. Before the series moves on to America, American culture is seen in its most garish form. These opening images make an announcement: This is not a filmed version of a beloved book. The interrogation sequence is in the novel, but near the end, in chapter 21 (and there’s no mention of Death Wish). TV and movies, of course, can also play with chronology, in this case foregrounding action that the novel saved for later.
A filmmaker can also create visceral sensation unavailable to the novelist. And Park, who showed how much damage one angry man can inflict with a hammer in his 2003 film, Oldboy, is certainly an artist of visceral sensation. Episode 2 finds the General (Toan Le) glad-handing an inner circle of his fellow South Vietnamese refugees in a squalid camp at Fort Chaffee, an Arkansas facility that was, in fact, used to shelter Vietnamese, Cambodian, Laotian, and Hmong refugees (in the novel, this scene takes place at Camp Asan, on Guam). Exhausted, grieving those left behind, disgusted by the horrible food, the women of the camp rebel, pelting the General (who has made the mistake of wearing his military uniform) with that food and forcing him and the Captain (Hoa Xuande) outside the dining hall.
In the novel, the General and the Captain take refuge in nearby showers. But not in the series. Park puts them in a cramped, foul-smelling latrine—then has maggots fall onto the General’s face. It doesn’t get much more visceral, or gross, than that. Park has upped the ante, giving the General’s fall from power and grace an extra level of humiliation and grotesquerie. Accustomed to subordinates cowering in his presence, he’s now just a landing pad for maggots.
Sometimes casting can make an artistic statement on its own. Among the executive producers of The Sympathizer is Robert Downey Jr. (and his wife, Susan Downey). Apparently, when your name is Robert Downey Jr. and you’re helping get the series made, you can play as many characters as you want—in this case, five. Downey is the Captain’s CIA handler, Claude. He’s a condescending professor of “Oriental studies,” Robert Hammer. He’s a rabidly right-wing California congressman, “Napalm” Ned Godwin, and a monomaniacal, Coppola-like filmmaker, Niko Damianos. And—spoiler alert—he also plays the Captain’s white American father, a major source of the Captain’s conflicted identity as a North Vietnamese spy (in the first sentence of the novel, he describes himself as “a man of two faces”).
When the Captain sees this rogue’s gallery of white faces, he sees the same paternalistic man he has come to despise. Despite (or perhaps because of) the stunt casting, the Downey multiplicity actually has a point that serves the story. (It also has an element of scenery chewing, especially the scene that finds the various Downeys sitting around the same table, like Eddie Murphy playing the entirety of the Klump family in The Nutty Professor.)
There’s no substitute for a great novel, and no way to harness a voice as wry and self-aware as the Captain’s; the tone of his narration is what keeps the reader turning pages. But the series is a fine example of what can happen when the right people take hold of an adaptation and make it their own, maggots and all.•
Join us on January 28 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Nguyen will sit down with CBC host John Freeman and a special guest to discuss The Sympathizer. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
