The Sympathizer Recap: Lost in Translation

Give Us Some Good Lines

Season 1 Episode 4

Editor's Rating 2 stars **

The Sympathizer

Give Us Some Good Lines

Season 1 Episode 4

Editor's Rating 2 stars **

Photo: Hopper Stone/HBO

The Captain has a new job. He's heading to Hollywood for four months to work as a cultural consultant on a film about the Vietnam War. Recruited by Niko Damianos, the director of The Hamlet, the Captain is tasked with ensuring the film's authenticity, a near-impossible gig, as his suggestions are often dismissed or entirely undermined by the director himself. The Hamlet is centered around six Green Berets who get stranded in a Vietnamese hamlet. The Captain interprets it differently, of course, explaining it as "a story of a small farming community who is forced to take in a bunch of uninvited guests." It leads you to wonder: Why did he accept the job then? What purpose does this side quest serve?

For Man, his handler, it's a chance to "give [the North Vietnamese] some good lines" in a major Hollywood production and to undercut American propaganda from the inside. The General similarly sees it as a means to reignite American support for the South. But the Captain's motives, as we later learn, are more sentimental. He's driven by a deep nostalgia for home, though a Hollywood production set in the Napa Valley strikes me as an unconvincing and unbelievable substitute for Vietnam. The Hamlet is written and directed by Damianos, a white "auteur" modeled after the real-life director of Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola. Robert Downey Jr.'s Damianos is an impudent and priggish artiste who refuses to budge on his creative vision. At the episode's start, the Captain is asked to present his greatest misgivings with the script. He's concerned that no Vietnamese characters have any lines. They don't even qualify as characters. The villagers are mere accessories to the setting, while the Vietcong is the antagonizing force that sets Damianos's plot into motion. Damianos, of course, dismisses this as a creative choice intended to highlight the plight of the Vietnamese people.

The Hollywood subplot is a mystifying departure from the previous episode's noir-ish murder plot. The Major's ghost occasionally reappears to haunt the Captain on set, but overall, it doesn't make sense to lower the stakes after the last episode's adrenaline rush. Whatever emotional charge the series has accumulated thus far sputters to a halting stop with the change of pace and scenery. It also comes at the expense of us getting to know the Captain. As Damianos, RDJ is downright absurd and distracts from the Captain, who's once again slotted into a second-in-command role. I've said it before: the script repeatedly sells the Captain's complexity short. Damianos's brutish condescension and bizarre exclamations upstages the Captain's reserved frustration. He's unable or unwilling to fully emote on set. Instead, he inhabits a posture of awkward discomfort, which fails to convey his veiled contempt for Damianos and Hollywood writ large. In Damianos's office, the Captain suggests some lines for the Vietcong in a rare outburst of rage. He slams the script on the table, shocking the director, and yells: "Confess, you fucker!" It's a satisfying outburst, delivered with an intensity that I wish was replicated in a later scene when the Captain gets fired … but I'm getting ahead of myself here.

While driving to set, the Captain finds Lana hiding out in his trunk. She wants to tag along and he reluctantly allows her to accompany him. In this episode, we see the Captain develop feelings for Lana as he presides over her without the General around. Yet there's a disappointing lack of chemistry between the two. They interact more like siblings than potential lovers. At the pre-filming party, Lana fawns over Jamie Johnson (Maxwell Whittington-Cooper), a Green Beret actor and popular soul singer, while the Captain meets the crew and other Green Beret actors, including James Yoon (John Cho) and the volatile method actor Ryan Glenn (David Duchovny), who insists on being addressed as Captain Shamus.

The Captain is given a tour of the production by Monique (Marine Delterme), the film's set designer and Damianos's girlfriend. He is stunned by her attention to detail. "I can almost smell my mother's cooking," he says approvingly. The Captain has one small request for her: a gravestone with his mother's name, Que Linh, since his family couldn't afford one when she died. The Captain soon treats it as a makeshift altar, lighting incense and displaying fruits as an offering to his mother. These details offer some insight into the Captain's past but are not a satisfactory substitute for his middling characterization. As a spy, his motivations are still quite obscure (or underdeveloped) to us. While the script has been quite faithful to the novel, it hesitates to frame the Captain as an anti-hero — a failure that a more mature actor might've redeemed. Instead, the Captain's countenance oscillates between passivity and pathos, with none of the shrewd intellect expected of a spy.

The Captain is on set to solve high jinks. On the first day of filming, for example, he realizes that most of the background actors are not Vietnamese. Damianos allows him to replace the extras with real Vietnamese people, so he recruits Bon and a few familiar faces from the South Vietnamese army to enlist in minor roles. The Captain manages to squeeze in a few lines of anti-American dialogue and increase the actors' pay if they pose as Vietcong. On set, the Captain notices that Bon is less depressed and enjoys acting in scenes where he's being killed. Lana, too, is eager to volunteer as an extra and cozies up to Johnson.

There's one scene in The Hamlet that makes the Captain especially uneasy. Yoon's character is captured and tortured by the Vietcong. While everyone praises Yoon for his acting (I'm biased, but John Cho always delivers), the Captain thinks of the torturous interrogations he's participated in. But things begin to unravel as Glenn's commitment to method acting leads him to a mental spiral. The actor has become boisterous and erratic to the other cast members, specifically Johnson, who he accuses of not taking the role seriously. At one point, the Captain envisions a scene between Glenn and Damianos, which leads the director to make significant changes to the script. "I'm recounting something I didn't witness myself," the Captain confesses in a voiceover. "Some of the dialogue is conjecture but it helps to explain the events that follow."

A quick aside: I actually think the episode would have benefited from more expositional voiceover in this manner. Imagine, for instance, a hypothetical scene where the Captain berates and physically assaults Damianos and then pauses to admit that didn't actually happen. It was just wishful thinking. Instead, we get some comedic improv between RDJ and Duchovny that is entertaining but unnecessary. And later, there's a semi-horny scene between Damianos and his set designer girlfriend about to get it on, in which the Captain jokes, "If this offends you, please skip ahead."

Damianos adds a grisly scene where a female villager gets raped by a Green Beret. To make matters worse, the villager is named after the Captain's mother, Que Linh, and will be played by Lana. When the Captain learns of this, he angrily confronts Damianos in his office. It's an anticlimactic confrontation where he hoarsely yells, "You don't know a thing about my mother!" (Yawn.) It may be his weakest scene so far. It's hard to believe that the Captain, who's murdered and tortured prisoners of war, will back down in the face of a sniveling "radical director" just because he was fired. The Captain sticks around out of concern for Lana. A few days before the scene, Glenn goes missing and returns with a slain deer draped across his shoulders, which only adds to the Captain's concerns.

In the scene, Johnson's character rushes in and rescues Que Linh/Lana while she is assaulted by Shamus/Glenn. Fearing for Lana's safety, the Captain interrupts the scene and ruins Damianos's singular take. Lana stalks off, angry at his interference, and the Captain is forcibly removed from the production. On his way out, he stops by his mother's "grave." Unaware that Damianos intended to blow up the false cemetery as a conclusive climax to the film, the Captain injures himself in the explosion. It's a confusing move: Ending an episode filled with low-stakes drama with an explosion doesn't quite alter the stakes. The best meta-commentary on this Hollywood detour was provided by the North Vietnamese commander, whom the Captain is recounting his tale: "Can you not see how you are corrupted by the most crass Hollywood indulgences? The very same indulgences you tried to change?" The same can be said for this very episode, which was regrettably bereft of any good lines.