You know times are tough when a movie as thin and predictable as An American Pickle gets a lot of advance, generally admiring publicity. It’s supposed to be a comedy/social satire in the form of a fable, and there are a few moments that may evoke a smile. In fact, quite a lot of An American Pickle is amusing, but let’s be honest – people don’t go to the movies for amusing. Well, actually, people don’t go to the movies at all these days, so let’s be blunt: most of us don’t even want to go to the bother of streaming a movie just for “amusing” or “kind of humorous”. It’s a waste of time, unless the picture makes us laugh a lot – or at least a fair amount. This movie fails the laugh test.
Before I go further, I need to say a couple of things.
First thing, about the story: An American Pickle is a Rip Van Winkle sort of tale. It’s about a Jewish immigrant named Herschel Greenbaum, who settles in Brooklyn in 1919, after his hometown, Schlupsk, somewhere in “Eastern Europe”, was destroyed by Cossacks. He eventually finds work in a pickle factory. This is just the intro to the real story, but even here you may get what I’m driving at. The made-up town name of Schlupsk is amusing. I smiled with anticipation when I saw it on a sign a couple minutes into the movie. And pickle is one of those words that is packed with anticipated funny – mildly humorous in its own right and ripe for the comedic picking. This film has loads of the kind of potential these two ideas suggest. The suggestion of a joke is not a joke, however.
Early on, poor Herschel falls into a vat of pickles just as the factory is shutting down for good. Through wholly implausible yet fable-like circumstances, he crawls out of the vat - wet, briny but very much alive and preserved - 100 years later in 2019. Of course, the world has changed a lot over a century! Or has it really? Herschel’s only living descendent turns out to be his great grandson Ben Greenbaum, a mild-mannered app developer and would be entrepreneur. Ben is unreligious, unmarried, unaggressive, unsuccessful (so far, anyway), and lives and works out of his (very nice) Brooklyn apartment. As you might anticipate, these two guys are polar opposites temperamentally and in most every other way. They don’t get along. It does not take a genius to realize that the balance of the story will be about how they eventually find common ground amid warm and fuzzy family values.
Second thing, about me: I have to confess that I only watched about an hour (70%) of An American Pickle before bailing. So, I didn’t get to see the last few complications that Herschel and Ben have to surmount before their undoubtedly sweet, glowing rapprochement and mutual enlightenment. I’m not all that busy in my life, and I don’t often quit on a movie two thirds in; but I felt like I just was wasting my time on this one. There are other things to watch, books to read, emails to catch up on, blogs to write, dishes to wash – almost anything else I might do would be more interesting. Maybe the movie redeems itself in its final twenty minutes, but I doubt it.
I should mention that the movie stars Seth Rogen playing both Herschel and Ben. Rogen also produced the film, which may be one of the reasons he is playing both roles. Rogen is a likable “everyman” type actor, known for Knocked Up (2007). This is the End (2013), and The Disaster Artist (2017), among many other pictures. I’ve never found him super funny per se; rather, he typically appears in comedies where the situations are what’s funny, and the actors’ reactions are intended to enhance and embellish the comic effect. In these, he comes across as a very relatable person for whom we can feel some empathy. Here, he is excellent as Herschel, especially in the first part, with a funny semi-authentic sounding Eastern European accent and a sincere, somewhat doltish expression much of the time. But by the halfway mark, the Herschel persona starts to get wearing and less and less credible. Playing Ben, Rogen is fine in his naturalistic, everyman mode, but less interesting overall than Herschel. Because of his years suspended in the pickling vat, Herschel is the same age as Ben. Yet although Ben is smart, he is surprisingly incurious about his newly arrived great-grandfather and the world in which he lived; so he comes across as a shallow, insubstantial person, repeatedly pointing out modern conveniences like Alexa and saying “pretty cool, huh?” over and over again. The problem is not Rogen or the other actors, but the direction and, especially, the writing.
The screenplay was penned by Simon Rich, based on a short story, Sell Out: Part One, published in The New Yorker in 2013. I’ve read it [you can too, right here] and it’s fairly funny in that droll New Yorker style. It’s funnier than the movie, for sure. Maybe droll doesn’t work as well in motion pictures than it does on the page. Rich has written lots of short stories, many of which are to be found in his five published story collections. He has also written for Saturday Night Live (2007-2011), created and wrote the FXX series Man Seeking Woman and the TNT series Miracle Workers. An American Pickle is his first feature length screenplay. And it shows.
Because the story is intended to be a fable, it gets away with some unrealistic tropes, not the least of which is Herschel’s unexplained survival, un-aged, in pickle juice for a full century. And after his old clothes are cleaned and returned to him good as new, he continues to wear these same duds over the weeks and months that follow, without comment. It’s a bit harder to accept how Herschel spends so little time mourning the fact that his beloved wife Sarah (Sarah Snook) has died during his century in suspension, and how he so quickly accepts his new circumstances. More than that, it is bafflingly weird that he evinces no interest in the epochal events that occurred during the intervening years and perhaps weirder still that Ben makes no effort to fill him in. Considering that Herschel is a Jew with a strong tribal and cultural identity and an equally strong faith, it strains credulity that Ben (also nominally Jewish) makes zero effort to apprise him either of the holocaust or the existence of Israel. Not to mention the Second World War; the rise and fall of the Soviet Union; the expansion of the franchise to women and their “new” equality of rights in areas ranging from employment to sexuality; and on and on.
As a satire, An American Pickle has chosen to comment on obvious low-hanging fruit: political correctness, gentrification, twitter and social media shaming, beverages (almond milk, Kombucha), the changing nature of work from industrial to digital, and the modern-day exploitation of workers in the form of internships. Some of this stuff is presented humorously. Mostly, though, it is so superficial and obvious as to be inartful and unfunny. You can see a lot of the jokes coming a mile away.
On the other hand, if you subscribe to HBO Max and you’re a fan of Seth Rogen, it’s free.
1 hour 28 minutes
Grade: C+
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