Jimmy in Saigon Review – Pulling Back the Layers on a Life Lost

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Category: Indies, Docs, Foreign Film

Published on Wednesday, 23 April 2025 12:30

Written by Janet Walker

Jimmy in Saigon, from Dark Star Pictures, presents a filmmaker’s search for the truth surrounding how his older brother, Jimmy, whom everyone had accepted died in the Vietnam war, really passed away, and his desire to understand him.

The filmmaker, Peter McDowell, opens his film by introducing the viewer to his family. We meet them at a family reunion, somewhere in the Midwest, where the family, parents, siblings, children and grandchildren, are gathered and except for Jimmy McDowell, the entire family unit was present. As we begin to meet this family, we see his mother still carries the burden of her first born son’s death, fifty years later, and his sister’s hesitancy, unsure of what this effort to dig into the closed chapters of their brother’s life and death will hold.

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We walk through forgotten moments in history, the Vietnam draft and the upheaval of the 1960s, and of course, the day Jimmy McDowell was drafted. McDowell was one of the fortunate ones, his first tour of duty landed him behind a typewriter, handling correspondence and other requisition orders. In a war that produced generations of casualties, this post was considered a cushy detail. However, that post would end, and McDowell was sent to Saigon.

From his letters, we see that life in the capital was exhilarating, even as the war was ending, and Saigon was falling. McDowell made it home, and for a short season was back in the Midwest. He was unsettled in the same two story brick house; were we first meet his family. Life in the Midwest was slow. McDowell had a tough time readjusting, although until the filmmaker decided to undertake this journey, it was generally associated with PTSD.

McDowell arrived at his understanding of himself during a season in Saigon, where his lifestyle choices he believed would make him a pariah at large, and more closely those that mattered to him, his family, and his Catholic upbringing, forced him, to choose a path that would allow him to live his life, openly, without his family ever knowing.

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Finding the truth can be upsetting to family dynamics and I can understand the filmmaker’s drive to find the truth, to pull back the layers of what was the accepted narrative to find the truth. Whether the narrative, the accepted truth, has worked for decades to keep the family world sedated, the flame has somehow been turned up and the gentle simmer of the boiling pot of truth has somehow become a pressure cooker, and nothing, and no one can hold back the effort to find and reveal the truth.  

As the filmmaker begins to find out more about bis brother and his radical life; we understand he died a civilian in Saigon. We also learn that those cushy assignments, and his apparent psychological resilience to the war, were covered by his use of heroin. He loved and, at the time his same sex relationship, in his mind was impossible to reconcile to his Catholic upbringing, and mentally this resulted in him believing he was a failure.

While investigating Jimmy’s drug use and sexuality, the filmmaker takes us from the Midwest to Vietnam, France and back home again. In his quest to get to know his brother, he uncovers a hidden romance, new family ties and a remarkable global love story.

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Jimmy in Saigon opens the closed chapters and allows the flame of the lost life of the brother he never knew to once again burn brightly.

Jimmy in Saigon opens April 25, 2025. See it.

Country: U.S., France, Vietnam.

Language: English, French, Vietnamese with English subtitles.

Runtime: 90 minutes.

Release Date: Select Markets April 25, 2025; VOD May 13, 2025.

Director: Peter McDowell.

Producer: Lucia Palmarini, Peter Schulman.

Executive Producer: Dan Savage, Corey Tong, George Guerra.

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Janet Walker is the publisher, founder, and sole owner of Haute-Lifestyle.com. A graduate of New York University, she has been covering international news through the Beltway Insider, a weekly review of the nation's top stories, for more than a decade.  A general beat writer/reporter and entertainment/film critic, she is also an accomplished news/investigative news/crime reporter and submitted for Pulitzer Prize consideration "Cops Conspire to Deep Six Sex Assaults" in the Breaking News Category and was persuaded to withdraw the submission. Ms. Walker has completed five screenplays, "The Six Sides of Truth," "The Assassins of Fifth Avenue," "The Wednesday Killer," "The Manhattan Project," and the sci-fi thriller "Project 13: The Last Day." She is completing the non-fiction narrative, "Unholy Alliances: A True Crime Story," which is expected to be released in early 2025. She is a member of the Los Angeles Press Club, the National Writers Union, and a former member of the International Federation of Journalists.