A brilliant performance in HBO’s alternate-history miniseries should not be overlooked by the TV Academy.
There’s a three-minute shot fromThe Plot Against Americathat I can’t get out of my head.
It’s one side of phone call that’s reaching across a nation on fire.
Credit: Michele K. Short/HBO
Seldon is frightened, for reasons I won’t spoil.
Bess is also frightened, because she’s seen the country go downhill all around her.
Her children are in danger.
Her community has been shattered.
At one point in the call, a gunshot blasts outside her window.
The camera begins the scene in a distant long shot.
By the end of the scene, we’re staring right up into Kazan’s face.
It’s an earned slow burn.
For most of the series, Kazan is the quieter-by-default half of the Levin marriage.
Bess is his nervous counterpoint, the first to suggest a move north to Canada.
Part of that is her protective parental impulse.
But Bess also grew up through anti-Semitism, the only Jew in her neighborhood.
“People would walk by our apartment and point,” she recalls.
“It wasn’t that I was mistreated, I was just ignored and alone.”
“Fear presides over these memories, a perpetual fear.”
Those are the first words of Roth’s novel.
And it comes across most of all in Kazan’s delicate performance.
