Simon and Burns’s adaptation of Roth is slow, exact and quietly frightening, and Morgan Spector and Zoe Kazan give it the best marriage on screen in a good while. It is thin in the middle and hurried at the end, and worth six evenings anyway.
David Simon and Ed Burns, who made The Wire, have turned Philip Roth’s novel The Plot Against America into six hour-long episodes, and the result is the quietest television about fascism we have seen. Charles Lindbergh runs for president in 1940 promising to keep the United States out of the war, and wins. For a long while nothing much happens to the Levins of Newark, and that is the method. Their radio gets louder, their neighbours get politer, and then a letter arrives. It is a fine, patient piece of work, and it runs out of time at the end.
Herman Levin (Morgan Spector) is an insurance man who reads the paper aloud and argues with it. Spector plays him as someone whose confidence in his country is total and has never been examined, and the performance is in how that confidence comes apart in stages: a shout at the wrong moment, a silence at dinner. Zoe Kazan’s Bess Finkel sees it coming first and cannot make him listen. Their kitchen scenes, some of them about nothing more than whether to look at a house in another neighbourhood, are the best marriage on screen in a good while. A scene in which Bess counts money at the table and says nothing moved us more than we expected, because Kazan shows you the whole calculation on her face.
Winona Ryder plays Evelyn Finkel, Bess’s sister, as a woman who has spent her life waiting to be asked into a better room, and when Rabbi Lionel Bengelsdorf (John Turturro) asks her, she goes. Turturro gives the rabbi a soft Southern drawl and a fondness for his own sentences, and the series takes him seriously rather than mocking him. He believes what he says. So does Evelyn, mostly, and Ryder plays the mostly. Anthony Boyle’s Alvin Levin, the nephew who wants to fight, is all elbows and grievance, and he changes in the second half in ways we will leave you to find.
Martin Ahlgren shoots almost everything indoors, in brown light from table lamps, so the outside world arrives as sound: a broadcast, a newsreel, a neighbour’s voice through an open window. Dina Goldman-Kunin and Richard Hoover’s Newark is a street of clapboard houses with porches close enough to hear the next family’s rows, and the period detail sits there without being pointed at. Brian A. Kates and Joe Hobeck cut to the length of a conversation rather than the length of a beat, so the episodes are slow, and meant to be. Minkie Spiro and Thomas Schlamme direct with the same restraint; nobody swings a camera to tell you something is wrong.
The scene that stayed with us is a family trip to Washington, midway through, in which a hotel does something small, legal and unforgivable, and Herman discovers that shouting no longer works. We felt our jaw set. There is no violence in it. There is a desk clerk, a manager, a policeman who is perfectly civil, and a man in a suit being told in front of his children that he is not who he thought he was. The series is full of scenes like that, and they are why it frightens; we recognised every one of the civil faces.
The method has a cost. Six hours is a long time to spend on foreboding, and the middle episodes, which follow Sandy Levin (Caleb Malis) into a government programme that sends Jewish boys to farms far from home, are thinner than the rest. Malis is asked to stand for a generation being lured away and is not given much of a boy to play. Azhy Robertson’s Philip Levin, the youngest and Roth’s narrator, watches a great deal and does less. Then the final hour, having spent five on slowness, has an enormous amount of history to get through and does it by bulletin and newsreel. It departs from Roth in ways we will not describe, and it does not give itself the time to earn them.
Set beside The Wire and Show Me a Hero, this is Simon in his usual mode, institutions seen from the kitchen table, in a period he did not live through, and the period suits him. Watch it two episodes at a time, on quiet evenings, and do not expect it to comfort you. Certificate 12, which seems low for something this bleak, though there is barely a raised fist in it.
