Adapted from the novel which imagined the victory of the anti-Semite and isolationist Charles Lindbergh over Franklin Roosevelt in 1940, this mini-series by David Simon began on Monday March 16 on HBO (and in France on OCS). With chilling echoes of Trump’s America.
“Hatred is very present. And he knows how to shake it ”, notes a character in the first episode of The Plot Against America (“The Plot against America”), a series which began airing on March 16 on HBO (and in France on OCS, with one day delay). “He” is Charles Lindbergh, a pioneer of American aviation known for his Nazi sympathies and his involvement in the America First movement, which campaigned in the early 1940s for the neutrality of the United States. United States in the war.
An impeccable cast
In his eponymous 2004 novel (2006, by Gallimard, for the French edition), Philip Roth imagined an America in which Lindbergh would have presented himself against Franklin D. Roosevelt and would have won the presidential election of 1940. An uchrony that David Simon (the creator, among others, of The Wire) and Ed Burns set out to bring to the screen. Which is why “Roth had given them his consent a few months before his death [en 2018]”, specifies the magazine The New Republic on its website.
Tackling a literary monument like Roth was by no means obvious. Before The Plot Against America, “There had already been eight adaptations of Roth’s books in the cinema”, dont “Six were completely missed”, judge the site The Times of Israel, who applauds this time a success. A point of view shared by many critics, who particularly salute an impeccable cast, which includes Winona Ryder and John Turturro.
Located in Weequahic, the district of Newark (New Jersey) where Roth spent his childhood, the story is filmed from the point of view of the Levins, a family in every way similar to Roth’s (in the book, the author gives moreover to his characters his surname).
Growing threats
“The
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Delphine Veaudor
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