Park Chan-wook and Don McKellar turn Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel into a stylish, frequently funny spy story told from the Vietnamese side. Hoa Xuande is superb; Robert Downey Jr.’s five roles are a joke the series tells too often, and the middle episodes drift.
Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel is narrated by a communist mole who follows the South Vietnamese general he is supposed to be betraying out of Saigon and into exile. Park Chan-wook and Don McKellar have made it into seven episodes: a spy story, a refugee story set in Los Angeles and a running argument with the Hollywood version of the war. It is handsome, clever and often funny. It is also a series with one joke about casting, told five times. We liked it, with reservations, mostly in the second half.
The frame is a confession. The Captain (Hoa Xuande) writes his account in a re-education camp for a Commandant (Quinn Hoàng) who keeps sending it back, and the series lets him stop, rewind and tell it again. A device that could have been tiresome gives the whole thing its rhythm. The first episode takes us out of Saigon in April 1975, and the airfield sequence, shells falling and families running for a plane that is already moving, had us gripped because we did not know who would make it. We were quietly shaken by the end, and we will leave it there.
Xuande has the harder job and does it beautifully. The Captain must be liked by the General (Toan Le), trusted by his CIA contact Claude (Robert Downey Jr.), loved by his blood brothers Bon (Fred Nguyen Khan) and Man (Duy Nguyen), and lying to nearly all of them most of the time. Xuande plays it without a wink. He listens, agrees, pours the drinks, and only in voiceover tells us what he thinks, in a dry, weary murmur that treats his predicament as slightly absurd. When he is allowed to feel something the effect is out of all proportion, and Sandra Oh, as Sofia Mori, who takes up with him in Los Angeles, is the one who unlocks it.
Barry Ackroyd and Kim Ji-yong shoot Saigon in thick yellow humidity and Los Angeles in flat white sunshine that makes the exiles look as if they have wandered onto the wrong set. Donald Graham Burt gives the General a strip-mall liquor store, and Danny Glicker dresses him in suits he wears like a uniform. Jo Yeong-wook’s score is jaunty when the material is grim and mournful when it is comic, and the mismatch is the point. Lee Jin, Vikash Patel and Fernando Stutz cut the Captain’s rewinds so lightly that they feel like a man correcting himself mid-sentence.
Then there is Downey. He plays Claude; Professor Hammer, an academic; Ned Godwin, a congressman; Niko Damianos, a director making a Vietnam film; and a priest, each under a different wig and set of teeth. The idea is plain: every white American with power over the Captain is the same man. We laughed the first two times, mostly at Hammer, who makes the Captain list his Oriental and Occidental qualities in two columns. Then we noticed that whenever Downey walked in we stopped watching the Captain and started watching Downey, which is the opposite of what the series wants.
Park directs the opening episodes and they have the wit in the camera: a pan that turns into a rewind, a cut that lands a beat early. Marc Munden and Fernando Meirelles take the rest, and the series settles into something more ordinary. The middle stretch, the General’s circle plotting, drinking and suspecting one another while the Captain reports to Man by letter, loses the thread more than once. Around the fourth episode we were unsure who was informing on whom and, worse, not much minding. The Hollywood episode, with Damianos bellowing at a fake Vietnam full of extras who are real refugees, pulls it back, and the closing episode is as strong as the first.
Against Park’s own television work this is looser. The Little Drummer Girl (2018) also sent an amateur into a double life and never let us lose the thread. Here it is lost and found several times, and the finding is usually Xuande. Watch it two episodes at a time, with your full attention, and do not start it at midnight. It asks a good deal of you and pays most of it back.
