Image: Hopper Stone/HBO
The Captain has a new career. He’s heading to Hollywood for 4 months to get the job done as a cultural expert on a movie about the Vietnam War. Recruited by Niko Damianos, the director of The Hamlet, the Captain is tasked with guaranteeing the film’s authenticity, a in the vicinity of-extremely hard gig, as his ideas are generally dismissed or solely undermined by the director himself. The Hamlet is centered around 6 Green Berets who get stranded in a Vietnamese hamlet. The Captain interprets it in a different way, of study course, conveying it as “a story of a little farming community who is forced to choose in a bunch of uninvited visitors.” It leads you to surprise: Why did he take the position then? What intent does this aspect quest serve?
For Gentleman, his handler, it is a probability to “give [the North Vietnamese] some good lines” in a major Hollywood production and to undercut American propaganda from the within. The Basic in the same way sees it as a indicates to reignite American guidance for the South. But the Captain’s motives, as we later understand, are far more sentimental. He’s pushed by a deep nostalgia for property, although a Hollywood generation set in the Napa Valley strikes me as an unconvincing and unbelievable substitute for Vietnam. The Hamlet is penned and directed by Damianos, a white “auteur” modeled after the genuine-everyday living director of Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola. Robert Downey Jr.’s Damianos is an impudent and priggish artiste who refuses to budge on his resourceful vision. At the episode’s get started, the Captain is asked to present his greatest misgivings with the script. He’s worried that no Vietnamese characters have any traces. They don’t even qualify as people. The villagers are mere equipment to the environment, although the Viet Cong is the antagonizing pressure that sets Damianos’s plot into movement. Damianos, of program, dismisses this as a artistic decision supposed to emphasize the plight of the Vietnamese folks.
The Hollywood subplot is a mystifying departure from the prior episode’s noir-ish murder plot. The Major’s ghost sometimes reappears to haunt the Captain on set, but overall, it does not make sense to reduce the stakes soon after the very last episode’s adrenaline hurry. Whichever emotional demand the collection has amassed so considerably sputters to a halting end with the improve of tempo and scenery. It also arrives at the cost of us getting to know the Captain. As Damianos, RDJ is downright absurd and distracts from the Captain, who’s when again slotted into a second-in-command purpose. I’ve said it in advance of: the script repeatedly sells the Captain’s complexity shorter. Damianos’s brutish condescension and bizarre exclamations upstages the Captain’s reserved stress. He’s unable or unwilling to entirely emote on established. Instead, he inhabits a posture of awkward irritation, which fails to convey his veiled contempt for Damianos and Hollywood writ substantial. In Damianos’s office environment, the Captain suggests some strains for the Viet Cong in a scarce outburst of rage. He slams the script on the desk, shocking the director, and yells: “Confess, you fucker!” It’s a enjoyable outburst, sent with an depth that I wish was replicated in a later on scene when the Captain receives fired … but I’m getting in advance of myself right here.
Whilst driving to set, the Captain finds Lana hiding out in his trunk. She needs to tag along and he reluctantly enables her to accompany him. In this episode, we see the Captain develop feelings for Lana as he presides more than her with no the Typical about. Yet there’s a disappointing deficiency of chemistry concerning the two. They interact extra like siblings than probable fans. At the pre-filming social gathering, Lana fawns above Jamie Johnson (Maxwell Whittington-Cooper), a Green Beret actor and popular soul singer, while the Captain satisfies the crew and other Inexperienced Beret actors, which include James Yoon (John Cho) and the volatile process actor Ryan Glenn (David Duchovny), who insists on staying addressed as Captain Shamus.
The Captain is specified a tour of the production by Monique (Marine Delterme), the film’s set designer and Damianos’s girlfriend. He is shocked by her interest to depth. “I can practically scent my mother’s cooking,” he states approvingly. The Captain has 1 tiny ask for for her: a headstone with his mother’s title, Que Linh, since his loved ones couldn’t afford to pay for a single when she died. The Captain quickly treats it as a makeshift altar, lights incense and exhibiting fruits as an featuring to his mom. These particulars offer some insight into the Captain’s previous 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 very faithful to the novel, it hesitates to frame the Captain as an anti-hero — a failure that a a lot more experienced actor might’ve redeemed. Instead, the Captain’s countenance oscillates amongst passivity and pathos, with none of the shrewd intellect predicted of a spy.
The Captain is on set to address hijinks. On the initial working day of filming, for instance, he realizes that most of the qualifications actors are not Vietnamese. Damianos permits him to change the extras with authentic Vietnamese men and women, so he recruits Bon and a handful of common faces from the South Vietnamese military to enlist in minor roles. The Captain manages to squeeze in a couple strains of anti-American dialogue and enhance the actors’ pay back if they pose as Viet Cong. On set, the Captain notices that Bon is fewer depressed and enjoys acting in scenes the place he’s being killed. Lana, also, is eager to volunteer as an extra and cozies up to Johnson.
There is just one scene in The Hamlet that will make the Captain especially uneasy. Yoon’s character is captured and tortured by the Viet Cong. While every person praises Yoon for his acting (I’m biased, but John Cho usually delivers), the Captain thinks of the torturous interrogations he’s participated in. But points begin to unravel as Glenn’s dedication to approach performing sales opportunities him to a psychological spiral. The actor has grow to be boisterous and erratic to the other cast customers, particularly Johnson, who he accuses of not using the purpose seriously. At a single issue, the Captain envisions a scene among Glenn and Damianos, which leads the director to make substantial alterations to the script. “I’m recounting anything 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 stick to.”
A brief aside: I actually think the episode would have benefited from more expositional voiceover in this method. Imagine, for occasion, a hypothetical scene wherever the Captain berates and physically assaults Damianos and then pauses to admit that didn’t actually happen. It was just wishful pondering. As a substitute, we get some comedic improv amongst RDJ and Duchovny that is entertaining but unwanted. And afterwards, there is a semi-attractive scene between Damianos and his established designer girlfriend about to get it on, in which the Captain jokes, “If this offends you, remember to skip forward.”
Damianos adds a grisly scene wherever a woman villager gets raped by a Inexperienced Beret. To make issues even worse, the villager is named just 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 place of work. It is an anticlimactic confrontation where by he hoarsely yells, “You never know a thing about my mom!” (Yawn.) It might be his weakest scene so far. It is challenging to believe that that the Captain, who’s murdered and tortured prisoners of war, will again down in the deal with of a sniveling “radical director” just simply because he was fired. The Captain sticks close to out of problem for Lana. A couple days prior to the scene, Glenn goes missing and returns with a slain deer draped across his shoulders, which only adds to the Captain’s worries.
In the scene, Johnson’s character rushes in and rescues Que Linh/Lana although she is assaulted by Shamus/Glenn. Fearing for Lana’s basic safety, the Captain interrupts the scene and ruins Damianos’s singular choose. Lana stalks off, indignant at his interference, and the Captain is forcibly removed from the output. On his way out, he stops by his mother’s “grave.” Unaware that Damianos intended to blow up the phony cemetery as a conclusive climax to the movie, the Captain injures himself in the explosion. It is a complicated shift: Ending an episode stuffed with very low-stakes drama with an explosion doesn’t quite alter the stakes. The best meta-commentary on this Hollywood detour was offered 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 really very same indulgences you experimented with to transform?” The very same can be said for this very episode, which was regrettably bereft of any very good lines.
