Alex Garland and Park Chan-wook Reckon with America

Park Chan-wook is an auteur more willing to put his thumb on the scale—and his new adaptation of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Sympathizer” offers another kind of reckoning with America. The series, premièring Sunday on HBO, centers on a man known only as the Captain (Hoa Xuande), a North Vietnamese spy embedded with a South Vietnamese general (Toan Le) first in Saigon just before its fall, then in nineteen-seventies L.A., where he continues to monitor the displaced military leader and begins to build a new life. The Americans who come into the Captain’s orbit—a cynical C.I.A. operative, a leering “Oriental studies” professor, a swaggering director with Altmanish aspirations—are equally eager to use him for their own ends. Park doesn’t shy away from the horrors of combat, but, in contrast to the vérité style of “Civil War,” the series is surprisingly playful both structurally and aesthetically, with Robert Downey, Jr., playing four different roles (sometimes in the same scene) and the Captain reversing his own narrative more than once as the story unfolds. Eventually, he ends up on what the general calls his “Hollywood mission,” attempting to inject meaning and dignity into an “Apocalypse Now”-style Vietnam War movie. It’s thankless work—but the exiles are acutely aware that culture can also be a battleground.SpotlightDance