What if: 'The Plot Against America' shows us what this country could have become if Charles Lindbergh beat FDR in 1940

Rabbi Lionel Bengelsdorf (John Turturro) puts his imprimatur on Charles Lindbergh’s (Ben Cole) presidential campaign, essentially giving Americans “permission” to vote for the isolationist fascist candidate without having to consider their own anti-Semitism in the HBO miniseries The Plot Against America, which is adapted from a 2004 Philip Roth novel.
Rabbi Lionel Bengelsdorf (John Turturro) puts his imprimatur on Charles Lindbergh’s (Ben Cole) presidential campaign, essentially giving Americans “permission” to vote for the isolationist fascist candidate without having to consider their own anti-Semitism in the HBO miniseries The Plot Against America, which is adapted from a 2004 Philip Roth novel.

I wouldn't presume to review a movie after watching the opening credits, so let's not call this a review of HBO's miniseries The Plot Against America. I've only seen what anyone else who consumes premium cable channels has seen. I'm waiting to see how it plays out, just like the rest of you.

On the other hand, I know the 2004 Philip Roth novel upon which the story is based and can already see how David Simon and Ed Burns, co-writers and producers of the series, have diverged from the book. This bodes well for the prospects of the series because as fine a novel as The Plot Against America is (and, despite some problems we'll address in a moment, it is a very fine novel), it's not readily adaptable to the screen.

It's usually pulpier novels -- novels of actions rather than ideas -- that translate best to movies and television.

One of the things that makes reading different from watching a film or a television program is the number of collaborators necessary to make the connection possible. A movie is a collaborative act that requires the coordinated efforts of dozens -- if not hundreds -- of people, each of whom goes about his or her job in unique ways.

While a director might conceive of how a movie should look, that vision is necessarily diluted by the mere fact that other people have to carry out that vision. Actors look as they look, and there is only so much that might be accomplished with prosthetics and digital effects. Costume designers make choices independent of the presumptive controlling intelligence of the project.

All movies are compromised by the limitations of the people who carry them out; the best somehow become more than the sum of the individual efforts put into them. Whereas a writer engages the reader in direct mind-to-mind communication.

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There are still limits and still compromises, and the act of reading is ultimately a collaboration as well, but a writer has genuine control over whatever universe he or she constructs. The more singular the writer's voice, the more difficult it is to replicate by committee.

Roth, who died in 2018, had a singular voice. And that's one reason why the movies made from his work -- Goodbye, Columbus (1969), Portnoy's Complaint (1972), The Human Stain (2003), Elegy (2008), The Humbling (2014), Indignation (2016) and American Pastoral (2016) -- are generally lousy. (I like Spanish director Isabel Coixet's Elegy a lot but don't receive it as particularly Rothian; Coixet's kinder, feminist worldview prevails over Roth's misanthropy. And while I haven't seen James Schamus' Indignation, I understand it's pretty good.)

Roth spends a lot of time wandering around inside the heads of his characters, and interiority is always a problem for filmmakers. The only way to solve it is by employing voice-overs, which some audiences find more off-putting than even subtitles.

I suppose a director could decide to have characters soliloquize these thoughts, but considering that things actually happen in Roth's books (bitter middle-aged professors have affairs with impossibly beautiful graduate students, Charles Lindbergh becomes president of these United States, the Port Ruppert Mundys baseball club becomes a permanent road team), anyone who decides to translate one of Roth's works to the screen is going to have to decide whether to lean into the thinky bits, concentrate on the sex and drama or give in to making a 16-hour movie with lots of fretting and strutting academics emoting and telling scurrilous jokes.

In some respects, The Plot Against America seems like a natural for the screen -- it's basically an alternate history about what might have happened had American hero Charles Lindbergh run against Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1940 election and won. What would have been the consequences for American Jews had a Nazi sympathizer who had been duped by Hitler become president?

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This isn't too different from the premise of Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle (adapted into a series on Amazon Prime) or Robert Harris' Fatherland, but it's complicated and maybe deepened by Roth's telling the story through a character named Philip Roth who, like the author Philip Roth, was 7 years old in 1940.

In the book, Roth situates his whole family, his whole Newark, N.J., neighborhood, in this alternate universe. The novel The Plot Against America is also a memory play, not far removed from, say, Woody Allen's Stardust Memories or Alfonso Cuarón's Roma.

It is the Roths who experience Lindbergh's election and its aftermath. In the novel, Philip's artistic older brother Sandy (an artist and advertising executive in real life) is selected for a Lindbergh administration program called Just Folks and sent away to live with an exchange family on a Kentucky farm, to be assimilated into mainstream America. He returns contemptuous of his family, calling them "ghetto Jews."

Simon and Burns immediately dispense with this autofictional device by renaming the family Levin, immediately unhooking it from Roth and his persona and all those other universes in which he placed characters named Philip Roth.

Herman Levin (Morgan Spector) is, as Herman Roth was, a successful insurance agent, living in a predominately Jewish middle-class neighborhood with wife Bess (Zoe Kazan) and sons Sandy (Caleb Malis) and Philip (Azhy Robertson).

Simon and Burns have done more than disassociate their project with Roth's personal history and memory. So far, they have done a very good job of distributing the film's point of view, letting us watch the world unfold through the eyes of characters other than young Philip.

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They've made the women stronger and more complex -- I don't remember much about Bess from the book, but here she's a strong, determined presence. She's also considerably younger than her desperate single sister Evelyn (Winona Ryder); in the book, she was older.

Evelyn's trajectory involves taking up with Rabbi Lionel Bengelsdorf (John Turturro), a Southern Jew who supports Lindbergh's agenda.

Roth was famous for what some would characterize as a very particular strain of misogyny (and others would argue was just a singular and specifically male perspective). So far, in episodes directed by Better Call Saul and Downton Abbey veteran Minkie Spiro, the miniseries has not subscribed to that particular worldview.

Their 1940 Newark is presumably very similar to the 1940 Newark Roth carried around in his head; it's not as hyper-specific as Roth's readers understand his Weequahic neighborhood to have been. It's presented through the amber glow of nostalgia, a leafy middle-class American place that all of us might recognize from family photographs or the movies with big porches where deep-waxed, boaty automobiles glide by.

Watch those cars as the series progresses: They should be Chevrolets and Cadillacs, maybe a few Chryslers. No Fords, because of Henry Ford's casual anti-Semitism.

"Out of choice, virtually nobody in our Jewish neighborhood owned a Ford automobile, despite its being the most popular car in the country," Roth wrote in an essay for The New York Times in 2004, explaining how he came to write his novel.

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"The great world came into our house every day through the news reports on the radio that my father listened to regularly," Roth wrote. "And the newspapers that he brought home with him at the end of the day and through his conversations with friends and family and their tremendous concern for what was going on in Europe and here in America.

"Even before I started school, I already knew something about Nazi anti-Semitism and about the American anti-Semitism that was being stoked, one way or another, by eminent figures like Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh, who, in those years, along with movie stars like Chaplin and Valentino, were among the most famous international celebrities of the century.

"The combustion-engine genius Ford and the aeronautical ace Lindbergh -- and our nation's anti-Semitic propaganda minister, the radio priest Father Charles Coughlin -- were anathema to my father as well as to his circle of friends."

Roth wrote that he got the idea for the book from a sentence he found in Arthur Schlesinger's autobiography that indicated that in 1940, a few Republican isolationists were hopeful that Lindbergh would run for president.

"That's all there was, that one sentence with its reference to Lindbergh and to a fact about him I'd not known. It made me think, 'What if they had?'" Roth wrote. That question led him to write the novel.

"To tell the story of Lindbergh's presidency from the point of view of my own family was a spontaneous choice. To alter the historical reality by making Lindbergh America's 33rd president while keeping everything else as close to factual truth as I could -- that was the job as I saw it. I wanted to make the atmosphere of the times genuine, to present a reality as authentically American as the reality in Schlesinger's book."

When it was published, I thought Roth's The Plot Against America one of his minor books. While there were plenty of fascists and isolationists in the United States in 1940, the chances of Lindbergh beating FDR in a general election seemed remote.

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And Lindbergh, while far from an American hero, was more a vainglorious man susceptible to flattery than a viable political figure. But more than that, the book seemed like a veiled attack on George W. Bush -- who was no Lindbergh.

It felt like the last part of the book had been rushed, like Roth had enjoyed constructing this nightmare America but had no real idea how to finish. So it kind of collapsed, suggesting that maybe Hitler had blackmailed Lindbergh by in 1932 kidnapping his infant son -- who wasn't really murdered but spirited away to be raised by the Nazis.

Given the way we've seen things turn in recent years, I'm inclined to give Roth more credit. There is a small but durable strain of fascism in the American makeup. It showed itself in 1940. It has never gone away.

Email:

pmartin@adgnewsroom.com

www.blooddirtangels.com

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Winona Ryder stars as Evelyn Finkel in David Simon and Ed Burns’ HBO adaptation of Philip Roth’s novel The Plot Against America.

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Zoe Kazan is Elizabeth “Bess” Levin in David Simon and Ed Burns’ HBO adaptation of Philip Roth’s novel The Plot Against America. While Roth’s novel is written from the adult perspective of Bess’ 7-year old son, the miniseries distributes the point-of-view among several characters.

MovieStyle on 03/27/2020

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