Image via Hopper Stone / ©HBO / Courtesy Everett Collection
After Robert Downey Jr.topped box office records with Avengers: Endgameand won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for Oppenheimer, it seemed like he peaked, making whichever project he chose next all the more interesting. Downey decided to co-star in and executive produce the Vietnam War series The Sympathizer, an adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name. The series was brought to life by the legendary South Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook, and starred Hoa Xuande as a North Korean spy known only as “The Captain” set in the 1970s. Downey’s involvement in the series was always going to attract viewers, but he really maximized his part by playing multiple characters.
The Sympathizer isn’t, of course, the first examination of the Vietnam War, but the series takes a uniquely dark and comedic approach to the cultural and political conflict between the warring Korean armies and their international supporters. Since the Captain’s undercover espionage operation in the United States involves making contact with various figures, Downey appeared as five different characters that represented different corrupt American ideals; he played the CIA agent Claude, the pretentious grad school professor Robert Hammer, the far-right political candidate Ned Godwin, the ambitious film director Niko Damianos, and a character known as “The Priest” who is the Captain’s French American father. The Sympathizer draws heavily from Stanley Kubrick, whose films helped to inspire the form and themes of the show.
Stanley Kubrick’s Influence Is Extremely Evident in HBO’s ‘The Sympathizer’
Kubrick’s own contribution to Vietnam War projects was the 1987 classic Full Metal Jacket, a darkly comedic, satirical anti-war film that shared many qualities with The Sympathizer. Full Metal Jacket was significant because it showed the parasitic side of patriotism, as characters like Joker (Matthew Modine) end up turning themselves into monsters in order to protect a nation that they have lost sight of. The same can be said for the Captain, who is willing to commit assassinations and risk his life for a government that doesn’t even trust him, as evidenced by a flash-forward scene in which he tells his story to a North Korean soldier who is torturing him. Both Kubrick and the directors of The Sympathizer understood that the best way to explore how ridiculous these political obsessions are was to exploit them with dark humor. Full Metal Jacket famously ends with a haunting portrayal of the “Mickey Mouse Theme,” and The Sympathizer similarly uses many ironic needle drops.
The most obvious tie to the entertainment industry is The Sympathizer’s fourth episode, “Give Us Some Good Lines,” which takes place on the set of the film that Damianos is making. Damianos has the qualities of an eccentric, auteur director, and is modeled after infamously “difficult” filmmakers like Oliver Stoneor Francis Ford Coppola, who made their own Vietnam War films with Platoon and Apocalypse Now, respectively. Full Metal Jacket was a unique study of the war because it did away with the grandiosity of those films by presenting something confusing, brutal, and traumatic. The Sympathizer continues the intentions of Full Metal Jacket by showing exactly what the set of a Vietnam movie would look like when Damianos showed no interest in honoring the experience of the natives, and was willing to exploit them for the sake of making something provocative.The Sympathizer addressed the issue from the perspective of a Vietnamese character who could compare what was happening on set with reality.
Robert Downey Jr. Adopted Kubrickian Techniques for ‘The Sympathizer’
Robert Downey Jr. smoking a pipe as a professor in The Sympathizer.
Downey’s approach to playing multiple characters is similar to that of Peter Sellers in Kubrick’s masterpiece Dr. Strangelove. In telling the ultimate story about the incompetency of those in power, Kubrick cast Sellers to play a British RAF officer, the President of the United States, and the titular nuclear war expert who oversees events that spark world chaos. By showing that these men — despite holding different positions of influence — all represent the same worldview made Kubrick’s satire more searing, and Downey serves the same purpose by showing how America has been compromised by a class of wealthy, privileged white men who exert their power with no sympathy for those caught in their way. Both projects end on an appropriately sobering note, which does not shy away from the devastation caused by putting such dangerous individuals in charge.
The Sympathizer also shares narrative links with many other Kubrick classics,as it tells a story of political infidelity like Barry Lyndon, expresses the anti-war sentiments of Paths of Glory, reflects the same communist themes of Spartacus, uses the non-linear narrative approach of The Killing, and even dips into dark themes of sexual aggression that were tackled in Lolita. The term “Kubrickian” is liberally used, and those who attempt to emulate the great director’s style often miss the idiosyncrasies that make his work so electrifying. Kubrick layered his films with hidden clues that kept people coming back to analyze them, and The Sympathizer has a similarly ambiguous approach because it’s unclear how reliable the Captain is as a narrator. Downey is an actor of such versatility, and it’s very disappointing that he never had the opportunity to work with Kubrick. However, The Sympathizer might just be the next best thing.
