The Plot Against America imagines the rise of an intolerant demagogue

David Simon is a master storyteller who in his best-known works, like The Wire, Treme and The Deuce, brings an edge of polemic to his narratives, calling attention to societal or institutional injustice. His Plot Against America is no exception.




Written by Charles McGrath

Philip Roth’s 2004 novel The Plot Against America imagines a counterfactual history in which Charles Lindbergh, campaigning on a promise of America First, defeats Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election and, colluding with Hitler, embarks on a program of government-sponsored anti-Semitism and Jewish resettlement.

A few months before he died, in 2018, Roth told me in an interview that he never intended his book as a political allegory. But by then, with the Trump administration in full swing, he agreed that the parallels between the world he invented and what was happening in contemporary America were hard to ignore: a demagogic president who openly expresses admiration for a foreign dictator, a surge of right-wing nationalism and isolationism, polarization, false narratives, xenophobia and the demonization of others.

Still, there was one difference, Roth insisted: Lindbergh, unlike President Donald Trump, had been a genuine hero.

During that same conversation Roth added, almost in passing, that he had recently agreed to let David Simon make a miniseries of the novel and that though he was unfamiliar with most of Simon’s work, he trusted him to get it right.

Now viewers get to decide for themselves. Simon’s six-part version of “The Plot Against America” — which he wrote with his frequent collaborator Ed Burns and which stars Winona Ryder, Zoe Kazan, John Turturro and Morgan Spector — premieres March 16 on HBO. Filmed mostly on a Queens soundstage, the series follows an extended Jewish family in Newark, New Jersey — here the Levins, changed from the Roths of the book — as they try to make sense of a now dangerous country that no longer welcomes people like them.

The parallels, resonances and connections — the ways Roth so eerily seemed to anticipate our present moment — are what most appealed to Simon. He is a master storyteller who in his best-known works, like The Wire, Treme and The Deuce, brings an edge of polemic to his narratives, calling attention to societal or institutional injustice. His Plot Against America is no exception.

“What I want people to take from the book at this moment is that all of us should be judged on what we accept and don’t accept,” Simon said recently, his voice rising as he warmed up to his theme. “The book works the way it works because it’s not about Lindbergh or Roosevelt — that’s just the input. The book is about six people in a family arrayed against an ugly political moment and what each of them does. What’s the cost of that and what’s the effect?

“Every one of us should be asking ourselves that question right now,” he added.

Roth was a man of strong feelings, and wasn’t shy about expressing them. So is Simon, who looks more like a bouncer than an Emmy-winning TV writer and producer. He’s passionate, intense, an occasional grudge-holder and a compulsive sender of tweets almost Joycean in invention and astounding in invective, many of them directed against Trump and his defenders. (“Spittle-chinned,” “gibbering submenial troll” and “incompetent slop” are among the few of his epithets that can be printed in a polite newspaper.)

A former police reporter, he’s not usually in awe of the famous or powerful, but he told me last summer, on the set of “The Plot Against America,” that the one time he met Roth, he was “so nervous you couldn’t have pulled a pin out of my ass with a tractor.”

Simon has adapted, very faithfully, nonfiction books for television (“Show Me a Hero,” “Generation Kill”) but had never before taken on a novel, and part of what made him apprehensive was that he had a problem with Roth’s ending. In the novel, Lindbergh and his plane suddenly disappear; after a brief period of chaos, order is restored and America goes back to normal.

Simon didn’t think that would work for a TV audience; there needed to be at least a hint of an explanation for the disappearance. He asked if Roth had any ideas.

“He had the book in his lap, and he began flipping through the pages,” Simon recalled. “Then he looked up and said, ‘It’s your problem now.’ In other words, ‘Figure it out, pal.’ I took that to mean I could at least try.”

Over the years there have been a number of attempts to bring Roth to the screen: some of them, like James Schamus’ Indignation, earnest and well-meaning, and some of them, like Ewan McGregor’s American Pastoral, pretty awful. None have been completely successful.

Along the way, there have been casting mistakes and directorial stumbles, but the main obstacles have always been Roth’s writing itself — how do you get that on the screen? — as well as his way of refracting his narratives through the voices of people who know only part of the story.

John Turturro, who plays Bengelsdorf in the miniseries — a Southern-born rabbi who becomes an apologist for Lindbergh, played by Ben Cole — was friendly with Roth and even collaborated with him on a planned, but ultimately never produced, one-man stage version of Portnoy’s Complaint. He recently said that when Simon first approached him, he was skeptical.

“I told him that there have never been any good adaptations, because they’re all truncated and you lose the prose,” he said. “That’s why I always wanted to do something onstage.”

Simon eventually won him over by explaining that HBO was allotting six hours to the project and by pointing out that of all of Roth’s books, “The Plot Against America” was the most story-driven and the one best suited to the screen.

“I really think it’s our best shot,” Simon told me last summer.

Much of the miniseries was shot then on a cavernous sound stage in Long Island City. The set smelled of freshly sawed lumber but was otherwise a meticulous re-creation of Roth’s boyhood home in Newark: dark woodwork, faded wallpaper, a bookcase containing a well-used set of The Book of Knowledge, an enameled cooking range, an early-generation refrigerator with the motor on top.

The only details not exact were the many family photographs: pictures of weddings and bar mitzvahs and the like. Several of the faces were in fact those of Simon’s own relatives.

“This story is very much about my father and his generation,” he explained. “My father is from Jersey, grew up in Jersey City. Before that, the family had a store in Union City. His mother, who ran the store, raised two kids in America but was, in her heart, a peasant from the shtetl. She had that sensibility of always having to step off the sidewalk because the Cossacks were coming.”

The more he looked at The Plot Against America, the more he felt it addressed some of our current problems, Simon said. “Roth’s book is not just about being Jewish but about being delivered to America and embracing it,” he added. “It’s about that generation that aggressively became American and about how that always happens if you just let it. If we just stop beating people up and stop highlighting the differences and the fears and the resentments, if you just take a breath and wait, we all become Americanised.”

For much of the summer, Simon was also wrapping up the third and final season of “The Deuce” and commuting back and forth between the two projects. Occasionally he seemed harried and impatient. “I’m wasting my life waiting for them to change a light,” he said one afternoon during a halt in filming, before flicking through his Twitter account. He sometimes uses his Twitter page, which he has called “performance art,” as a way to kill time, he said.

“Maybe I should be in a softball league or something,” he added.

But Simon, in real life, is kind and thoughtful, nothing like his Twitter feed. He made himself available to the actors and directors — Minkie Spiro for the first three episodes and Thomas Schlamme for the last three — and he was expansive about his hopes for the miniseries.

If we mess this up, we’ve messed up the best chance, he said, or words to that effect. “I’ve seen all the adaptations, but this one has the structure of long-form television and a political relevance at this moment,” he added. “Given those things, we’re actually working at an advantage.”

A disadvantage, he admitted, is that The Plot Against America is one of Roth’s refracted narratives, told from the point of view of a very young Philip, or rather, a young Philip as remembered by his adult self. “What do you do about that?” Simon said. “Voice-over? You can count on two hands the number of good voice-over films.”

His solution was to tell the story from multiple points of view, including those of Herman and Bess, his father and mother; his brother, Sandy; Bengelsdorf; Bess’ sister, Evelyn; and Philip’s cousin, Alvin, who is so strongly opposed to Lindbergh and Hitler that he enlists with the Canadian army and loses a leg fighting in Europe.

This opens the book up and allows it to become more explicitly political, Simon said. “It allows you to experience the time and the risks and the conflict, and to witness some of it, not just hear about it.”

Simon’s approach also greatly enlarges and complicates some of the characters, especially Alvin, for whom he clearly feels a greater fondness than Roth did (or Roth the narrator, anyway), and Bengelsdorf, who here emerges as an almost tragic figure, not just a syrupy, cringing yes-man. It was this side of the character that drew Turturro to the part, and he added to the character some insights he had gotten from a conversation he once had with Roth about Primo Levi’s book “The Drowned and the Saved.”

“There’s a great chapter there about Chaim Rumkowski,” Turturro said, referring to the head of Poland’s Lodz ghetto during World War II, who, thinking he was saving them, presided over the resettlement of thousands of Jews. “He’s someone who thinks, ‘I can negotiate; I can protect everybody.’ I think that may have inspired the character.”

Ryder, who says she has been a “Roth-head” since she was 18, plays Evelyn, Bess’s sister (younger in the book, older in the series), who talks herself into falling in love with Bengelsdorf and becomes his willing accomplice. It’s a part she was eager to get because she thought it would be interesting for a change to play a weak woman, not a strong one (as she did in “Show Me a Hero,” about a ruinous desegregation battle in Yonkers). But it caused her so much anxiety, especially after a scene in which she dances at a White House state dinner with Nazi foreign minister Von Ribbentrop, that she almost went to the emergency room.

“I think it was something to do with Turturro,” she said. “Even before we started shooting, he was saying, ‘I’m going to drink the Kool-Aid and totally, totally believe what I’m saying.’ He was just so good, it was scary. Sometimes I was afraid that it was going to start making sense — the words that were popping out of his mouth. But it was hard for me to forget that my character was so on the wrong side of everything. I got there about 90%, but there was always a part of me that knew how horribly wrong she was.”

Like Ryder and Turturro, Spector, who plays Herman, read “The Plot Against America” when it first came out, back in the George W. Bush era. “I thought it was resonant even then,” he said. “But we didn’t know from demagogues back then.”

Kazan, on the other hand, said that she had never read any Roth before signing on to be Bess and that when she did look at “The Plot Against America,” she was struck by how prophetic it seemed. “It’s impossible not to see the parallels,” she said. “I remember thinking when I read the book, ‘People aren’t going to believe this; they’re going to think we invented it just for the show.’”

During shooting, Simon said he worried about tampering with Roth’s great work. “You lose some things, you maybe gain some things — that’s the nature of adaptation,” he said last month, after the series had wrapped. “At first I was really worried about the violence I was about to do to Roth’s book. And I will say that when I was in the middle, I thought, ‘I’m messing with something primal here.’ And when he passed away I thought, ‘Well, I’m sorry he’s not here, but at least I don’t have to show him what I’ve done.’

“And now I think I’m really sorry,” he went on. “Because I think it’s OK, and I think he’d be intrigued.”

Simon admitted that the conclusion of his “Plot Against America” is a good deal darker and more uncertain than Roth’s, a reflection of the cultural moment at hand. “Do you think we can go back to normal after Donald Trump?” he said. “I don’t. I’m very frightened. Something has shifted in our whole political demeanor, and we’re not dealing with it.

“We’re having this argument: Is Donald Trump good or bad?” he added. “As if the argument ends with him.”

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