Variety reviews HBO’s latest, ThePlotAgainstAmerica, starring Winona Ryder and Zoe Kazan. Will you watch?
” comes when Herman the father of a family of Jews in an increasingly anti-Semitic 1940s America, has been pushed past his limit by the bullying of his countrymen, including a fellow restaurant patron trying to intimidate him. The series, like the 2004 Philip Roth novel on which it is based, narrates an alternate history in which a President Charles Lindbergh appeases Adolf Hitler and gives rhetorical cover to prejudice stateside.
Because much of the breathlessly rushed story in the early going will be hard to comprehend for those who haven’t read the novel, Roth’s work provides a yardstick. His book uses the device of recollected childhood: All information comes to us from an adult Roth narrating conversations he heard or news developments as he understood them in his youth in Newark.
That the show’s parallels to the present moment — in this case, to our own president’s Jewish daughter and son-in-law, swooning over State Dinner invitations as they ignore dog-whistles towards a constituency fueled by hate — are obvious does not recommend “The Plot Against America,” exactly, but can’t be held against it either. The Trump era is so thuddingly obvious that its being applicable to any depiction possible of noxious egocentrism comes as no surprise.
This all works against the elemental pull of the story. The characters in “The Plot Against America” are a family of un-extraordinary people living in extraordinary times. Herman meeting the moment perpetually with a sort of aphoristic wisdom is one kind of superpower; the family’s protracted entanglement, at a distance of hundreds of miles, with the federal government is another.
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