David Simon’s Philip Roth adaptation has its feet in the 1940s and
its head in the present day.
By LAURA MILLER
John Turturro in The Plot Against America.
You can’t miss the contemporary political
undertones in The Plot Against America, David Simon’s HBO adaptation of Philip
Roth’s 2004 novel—in fact, they’re barely even undertones. Hewing fairly close
to Roth’s book, the six-part miniseries is set in an alternate version of
America where Charles Lindbergh wins the presidency in 1940 on a platform of
anti-war isolationism and thinly veiled anti-Semitism. Roth got the idea for
the novel after learning that the celebrated aviator, a member of the
pro-fascist America First Committee, was floated by some right-wing Republicans
as a potential rival to Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Roth’s novel, one of his best, wrestled with his own ambivalence
about his identity. He resented being regarded as a Jewish writer rather than
an American writer, and fiercely resisted any pressure to act as a Jewish
spokesman or representative. The Levin family of Newark, New Jersey, at the
center of The Plot Against America, is based on Roth’s own, so much so that he
gave the Levins the corresponding first names of his parents, his brother, and
himself. But the most vigorous proponent of Roth’s full-throated patriotism in
The Plot Against America is not Philip (Azhy Robertson), who observes much of
the action with a child’s wonder and confusion, but his father, Herman (Morgan
Spector). Herman begins the story viewing the U.S. as his homeland, a place
where fascism can never take hold, and each episode chronicles the steady
erosion of that faith under the Lindbergh administration.
The miniseries may be rich in mid-20th-century New Jersey
atmosphere—the pin curls, lace curtains, swing bands, dark wood furniture, and
burly guys slinging potato sacks in tweed caps—but it’s likely to trigger PSTD
lingering from 2016. It’s all here: Herman ranting before the election,
“Everyone knows what he is. Everyone I talk to,” and his Jewish boss
countering, “He’s tapped into something, maybe not with us, but among the
goyim.” By the end of the second episode we’ve come to the grim stations of the
cross that is election night, early-evening optimism with the Levins laughing
around the radio segueing into a final shot of a solitary Herman glowering into
the shadows of an uncertain future. He wants to fight, but his wife, Bess (a
quietly mesmerizing Zoe Kazan), is far more disposed to flight. When the family
takes a sightseeing trip to Washington, she fears that every seemingly helpful
person they encounter, from cops to a tour guide, is a secret brownshirt.
Roth’s novel concerned itself with political catastrophe as it
unfolds before Philip’s increasingly wised-up eyes. Simon’s miniseries refracts
the events through each character as he or she responds differently to the
slowly building menace: stubborn Herman; nervy Bess (who is soon lobbying for a
move to Canada); Sandy (Caleb Malis), Philip’s older brother, smitten with the
dashing figure Lindbergh cuts and an eager participant in an exchange program
designed to send urban Jewish kids to live with heartland farm families to give
them a taste of “the real America.” The program’s founder, Rabbi Lionel
Bengelsdorf (John Turturro), is a smooth accommodationist with a South Carolina
drawl, thrilled to serve the handsome young president. In the novel, the rabbi is merely a slick opportunist, but Simon and
Turturro have transformed him into an object lesson in disastrous
self-delusion. Bess’ sister, Evelyn (Winona Ryder), marries him, and he plucks
her from impending spinsterhood into wealth and influence—until one night she finds
herself dancing at a White House dinner with the Nazi foreign minister Joachim
von Ribbentrop. By the end of the miniseries, Ryder’s exquisite cheekbones look
brittle enough to crack.
The Plot Against America is entertaining: handsome, well-acted, and
full of tensely plotted sequences—most notably, a road trip that Herman and
Sandy make to Kentucky to rescue a little boy whose mother has been murdered by
an ascendant KKK. But it has a slippery relationship to reality. It’s neither
an unabashed counterfactual fantasia, like The Man in the High Castle, nor, for
obvious reasons, especially realistic. It suffers from the solipsism of its
source material; Roth was always terrible at imagining the experiences of any
other group targeted by American prejudice. In the miniseries, silently noble
blacks attend the funeral for Walter Winchell, assassinated after he launches a
presidential campaign to defeat Lindbergh, and the Levin’s Italian neighbors
show up to offer the family bundt cake and a loaded pistol when anti-Semitic
violence breaks out on the streets of their neighborhood. But what, exactly, is
happening to these and other minorities as racist and fascist forces, what
Herman’s boss describes as “Cossacks,” grow ever more emboldened? “These
assholes,” Herman spits out, “They’ve always been there, but now they have
permission to crawl out from under their rocks.” And when they do, something
tells me they come after more than just the Jews.
The Plot Against America reminds its viewer so incessantly of its
parallels to 21st-century politics that it often feels more like a parable than
a drama. “This is how it starts,” says Herman just after the election.
“Everyone thinking they can work with the guy, bring him around.” “Congress
won’t stand for it!” he protests to his boss after the man predicts that
Lindbergh will ally the U.S. with Hitler. “Won’t they?” the man replies. “We
don’t have enough Democrats left after the landslide.” Herman berates his
merchant brother for deciding Lindbergh is not so bad because he seems to be
good for business. And when Herman’s nephew Alvin, who volunteers to fight with
the British and comes back missing a leg, is approached by resistance agents to
help with a plot to take Lindbergh out, he remarks, of the vice president, “Even
if you pull it off, you still end up with Wheeler. He’s no better than
Lindbergh. He might even be worse.”
It’s hard to immerse yourself in a fictional, historical world that
won’t stop buttonholing you to point out its similarities to the real, contemporary
one. The Plot Against America isn’t agitprop—not quite—and God only knows
Roth’s novel was darkly predictive of the slide toward authoritarianism we’ve
witnessed over the past three and a half years. But the series’ feet are in the 1940s while its head is in the late
2010s. And as a result doesn’t feel like
it fully belongs anywhere.
https://slate.com/culture/2020/03/plot-against-america-hbo-david-simon-philip-roth-review.html
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