On September 15, Robert Downey Jr. will virtually definitely take house his first Emmy as finest supporting actor in a restricted sequence for HBO‘s The Sympathizer.

It is going to be the newest coronation in a 12 months of coronations for a star who’s undisputedly one among our best, and it is going to be tough to begrudge; what Downey does in The Sympathizer hits that candy spot between “ridiculously entertaining” and “an entire lot of appearing” that award-givers love.

However two issues may be true: Downey’s efficiency in The Sympathizer may be saluted as a dexterous feat of actorly gymnastics. On the identical time, it’s the misplaced fulcrum that too typically causes this seven-episode adaptation of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel to lose its tonal and narrative stability.

This model of The Sympathizer continues to be substantive and audacious, a slab of satire and deeply felt human tragedy that’s worthy of dialog and consideration, even when the consideration results in the conclusion {that a} kitchen-sink strategy that labored on the web page struggles to coalesce on the display.

Created for HBO by Park Chan-wook (Determination to Depart) and Don McKellar, The Sympathizer truly stars Hoa Xuande because the unnamed narrator recognized solely as The Captain. The story is advised by The Captain’s confession in a Vietnamese re-education camp. It’s a number of years after the top of the conflict, by which he served as aide-de-camp to a well-liked if largely ineffectual South Vietnamese Normal (Toan Le), whereas on the identical time working as a double agent for the North Vietnamese.

The Captain’s confession takes us by the closing days of the Vietnam Struggle and into Los Angeles’ Vietnamese exile group, from the tarmac on the eve of Saigon’s fall to the snooty halls of academia to the chaotic set of a Hollywood film concerning the conflict.

It’s a narrative of dualities. The Captain is torn between sides of a biracial identification (his mom is Vietnamese, his father European) which have assured his standing as “different” irrespective of the place he’s — a “bastard” or “half-breed” in Vietnam and an enigmatic “Oriental” within the States. He’s a faithful Communist with a passionate urge for food for American standard tradition. He has two finest mates — Man (Duy Nguyễn), his Northern handler in counterespionage, and Bon (Fred Nguyen Khan), motivated by private tragedies to be a fierce soldier for the South.

In a world by which all the pieces round him exists in binary type, The Captain exists within the grey, shifting his recall of occasions relying on his viewers and making us absolutely complicit within the subterfuge. His identification is fully fungible, with no core ideology or persona remaining. He’s torn between houses, between flashbacks and the current, and, naturally, between girls — the caustic Ms. Sofia Mori (a really humorous Sandra Oh) and the tantalizing distraction of the Normal’s daughter, Lana (breakout newcomer Vy Le).

He’s, by design, some of the irritating heroes you’ll ever encounter, and the sequence’ administrators — Park, Fernando Meirelles and Marc Munden — seize the self-aware qualities of his storytelling with bits of meta cinematic grammar. He can rewind his story like a VHS cassette, he acknowledges when he’s recounting items of the narrative that he wasn’t current for and the finale is such a pointed exploration of the challenges of discovering closure that The Captain laments, “Why do I’ve this ominous feeling that the opinions should not going to be good?”

Oops. I haven’t talked about Robert Downey Jr. in whereas, have I? (Cue the rewinding sound impact.) Downey, additionally an government producer, performs 5 characters, together with shady CIA agent Claude, crazed auteur Nikos and The Captain’s Asian-fetishizing grad college mentor Professor Hammer. On the web page, they’re one-dimensional information factors on The Captain’s picaresque odyssey, however right here, below Downey’s disguised watch, they arrive collectively to create a Voltron of mediocre white males, united by their need to take advantage of The Captain in numerous capacities, colonizing his identification like Europeans colonized his homeland.

Conceptually, it’s a stunt, achieved by comically inclined hair and make-up that scream, “Look, it’s Robert Downey Jr. AGAIN!” It’s additionally borderline good insofar because it makes this parade of figures right into a figment of Captain’s perspective, a understanding upending of “All of them look alike to me” stereotyping. However the stunt turns into the story, and the satirical bent shifts from Catch-22 to Dr. Strangelove. All of it leaves Xuande, doing a little splendidly refined issues to convey his understanding of a person who doesn’t know himself, too incessantly upstaged by Downey’s wigs, latex accoutrements and vocal affectations, which sound, maybe deliberately, like Richard Nixon by the years.

There’s extra of these 5 characters within the miniseries than within the novel — or a minimum of it seems like there’s extra of them — leading to much less of The Captain and fewer of Bon and the Normal (Khan and Le are glorious as effectively). When the sequence pushes from roughly a 50/50 satire-to-drama ratio to extra like 20/80 within the closing episodes, it seems like we didn’t get fairly sufficient time with our conflicted hero.

Upstaging is all the time a hazard in any story by which the principle character is a reactive chameleon. Assimilation is The Captain’s superpower, till assimilation begins to destroy him, and Xuande captures that sense of invisibility completely. However the present round him is vulnerable to overcompensating, simply in case you don’t discover The Captain fascinating.

When Park is behind the digital camera (for 3 episodes), the sequence is playfully askew in a lot of his trademark methods. The director has his personal obsessions with duality, individuals hiding issues from one another and from themselves, and he is aware of the facility of strange digital camera positioning or cheeky bits of masked enhancing or colours that pop in sudden methods. When different administrators take over, the sequence is way much less visually distinctive, a lot much less creative. Not less than the behind-the-scenes film episode, helmed by Meirelles — the best-executed of the formidable set items from Nguyen’s very cinematic novel — has a excessive quantity of favor, even when the general strategy and Downey’s presence make it right into a darker, much less hilarious Tropic Thunder companion piece.

And there’s nothing precisely mistaken with that, nor with going extra Dr. Strangelove than Catch-22. There was no episode of The Sympathizer that didn’t ship a couple of laughs and some gut-punches, however because the story strikes towards its massive climax and has to go away the Robert Downey Jr. costume celebration behind, the sequence it tries to resolve doesn’t all the time really feel just like the sequence it simply spent six earlier episodes attempting to be. It’s an identification disaster that’s thematically applicable, if not fully satisfying to look at unfold.

‘The Sympathizer’ Assessment: Robert Downey Jr. Dazzles and Distracts in HBO’s Adaptation of the Pulitzer-Profitable Novel