The true story of the Emergency Rescue Committee is perfect TV drama fodder. American activist journalist Varian Fry ran an office in a Marseille hotel in 1940, working with a ragtag band of resistance operatives, US expats and the odd sympathetic diplomat to enact a grand plan: help Jewish or anti-Nazi writers, artists, philosophers and other blacklisted individuals to escape persecution in Europe and emigrate to a fulfilling new life.
In a coruscating riviera setting, disparate people with a shared purpose band together to achieve something truly noble, working in the flickering shadow of the Holocaust without the extreme violence of nazism coming close enough to force the narrative fully into the dark. It could be a great drama, and Transatlantic … nearly is one.
Co-created (with Daniel Hendler) by Anna Winger, the writer behind Deutschland 83 and Unorthodox, Transatlantic doesn’t match the kinetic thrills of the former or the intense characterisation of the latter. It has many competing elements but, more than anything, it’s a sunny adventure, fully aware of the threatened horror that fuels it – but light enough in tone that you could almost imagine it going out on a Sunday evening on ITV.
Our lead character is not Fry but one of those expats, Mary Jayne Gold (Gillian Jacobs). Flush with money wired over from Chicago by Daddy, Gold is putting off returning home for as long as possible, fearful of falling into a life of enervated posh housewifery: finding cunning ways to use her wealth to help the refugees who camp on the beach at Marseille gives her life. Fry (Cory Michael Smith), meanwhile, has a wife at home but is in love with his ERC colleague Thomas (Amit Rahav) – portraying Fry as gay mirrors the book the series is “inspired by”, The Flight Portfolio by Julie Orringer. The novel’s take on Fry’s sexuality was seen as crass speculation when it was first reviewed in 2019, but less so a few weeks later when Fry’s son wrote to the New York Times to say Orringer was right.
With Gold swiftly falling for dashing polyglot refugee Albert Hirschman (Lucas Englander), there is as much romance as there is daring heroism when the ERC gang hole up in a villa on the edge of town, temporarily living with the likes of Max Ernst, André Breton, Marcel Duchamp and Marc Chagall as they try to get the illustrious fugitives on to a ship, a plane or along a secret path through the Pyrenees.
As a palatable history lesson, Transatlantic is comprehensive. The culpability of America for the refugees’ plight is baldly set out: Fry is driven by anger at how his attempts to report on antisemitic violence in Germany have been ignored in the States, while the character of US consul Graham Patterson, played by Corey Stoll as a heartless realpolitik merchant (“Henry Ford sold over 60,000 Model Cs in Germany in the last five years!”), embodies how the then-neutral USA didn’t let compassion compromise its self-interest. As you might expect from the co-creator of Unorthodox, the question of how some characters view their Jewishness – Hirschman is a man who rejected this part of his identity as a carefree young man, before the Nazis forced him to reconsider – is intelligently handled. There are stimulating contemporary parallels too. The south of France isn’t occupied by Hitler’s troops, but is run by the Nazi-adjacent Vichy collaborators, who publicly complain of an illegal immigration crisis before coming up with a solution: stop the boats.
Transatlantic struggles, however, to weave its learning points elegantly into the drama, to show rather than tell. Whether it’s the importance of the artists, the political realities on the ground or the protagonists’ personal dilemmas, what we need to know tends to arrive neatly packaged in speechy dialogue. One aspect of Gold’s character is that she ends up using her physical attractiveness in ways that demean her, but if you didn’t perceive that this often used to be the fate of female intelligence officers, a supporting character is on hand to spell it out.
This contributes to Transatlantic’s tonal problems. The daring rescue of the refugees, and the two love stories within the ERC’s ranks, are potentially epic stories that don’t feel epic, taking place as they do amid peril that never feels all that perilous – because the setting shines, the famous writers and artists are amusingly wacky and, with the muted Jacobs slightly miscast in the lead role, the rescuers are defined more by capering pluck than death-defying courage. Some scenes with the bumbling cowards in the local police force have a faint whiff of ‘Allo ‘Allo! about them.
After seven episodes that probably could have been four, a rousing tale has been told, and the ERC have successfully been immortalised – but Transatlantic itself might not be remembered.
Transatlantic is on Netflix.
