The Plot Against America, review: a chilling, convincing alternative history lesson

The chilling thing about The Plot Against America (Sky Atlantic), an adaptation of the Philip Roth novel, is how little happens in the opening episodes. There is no Jewish ghetto in New Jersey, no swastikas are paraded through the streets. It is 1940 and the aviator Charles Lindbergh is running against Franklin D Roosevelt for the presidency of the United States. He isn’t a Nazi, his supporters insist, he simply wants the US to stay out of Europe’s war and not sacrifice American lives to someone else’s conflict. There is nothing to be alarmed about. It couldn’t happen here.

It’s a slow-burning start for this six-part drama from David Simon and Ed Burns, but the sense of foreboding builds. That’s partly because the source material is well-known: Roth’s 2004 bestseller imagined an alternative history in which Lindbergh won the election and led the country into fascism. But it’s also in the little details. The smart ladies in the department store, wearing Lindbergh badges, who give Jewish shop assistant Bess (Zoe Kazan) the coldest of stares. The glance from a prospective neighbour when Bess and her husband, Herman (Morgan Spector), go to view a house in a middle-class, non-Jewish suburb.

Herman is the character who sees what’s coming, who rightly fears for the future. He yells at the radio when he hears Lindbergh making a speech (taken from real life) about the powerful elements pushing the US towards war: the British, the Roosevelt administration and the Jewish people. “This is how it starts,” Herman says. “Everyone thinking he doesn’t mean what he says.” Lindbergh used the “America First” slogan. If this had been written in the age of Trump, it would seem too obvious.

The brilliance of the adaptation is in the way it conveys the creep of fascism. It’s in the ether. Jewish families continue with their lives, kids play in the street, but the people around them are silently absorbing a new language of bigotry. The horror will be in how the populist message turns to outright hate, and how many ordinary Americans find it a comfortable place to be.

Winona Ryder is the star name here as Bess’s sister, Evelyn, who is starry-eyed over Lindbergh and his cheerleader, Rabbi Bengelsdorf (John Turturro). As befits her Hollywood star power, Ryder exudes 50 per cent more glamour than anyone else on screen. The dialogue can lean too heavily towards exposition, and there is a staginess about some of the scenes. But as an alternative history lesson, it is frightening and compelling.