Film Review: An American Pickle
There’s a confusing flavor in the brine of An American Pickle
Seth Rogen pulls double duty in the absurdist comedy-drama, An American Pickle, directed by noted cinematographer and frequent Rogen-collaborator Brandon Trost in his feature debut. But even with two singularly great performances from Rogen, Pickle can’t save its muddled self from plot points that fizzle and a script full of dead air. Minor spoilers ahead…
An American Pickle starts promisingly enough. Setting a refreshing tone that leans more dry and deadpan than your signature Seth Rogen ribaldry, the film opens with a charming preamble: In 1919, Herschel Greenbaum (Rogen), an impoverished ditch digger making his living in the fictional and vaguely Russian peasant village of Schlupsk, struggles to make ends meet. Amidst the slapstick follies of his menial job, he falls in love with and courts Sarah (Sarah Snook, HBO’s Succession, Predestination), a beautiful woman who still has all her teeth - a sure sign of a catch in Schlupsk. When their entire wedding is slaughtered by raiding Russian Cossacks, Herschel promises Sarah a marginally better life by emigrating to the United States, where he settles into a new normal clubbing rats at a Brooklyn pickle factory. However, Herschel’s entire existence is upended when, one day, a mishap with the rodents leads to him being brined alive in a pickle vat, moments before the factory is condemned. By the time he wakes up, it’s a century later, and all of his loved ones and descendants are dead, save for one Ben Greenbaum (also Rogen), an ambitious programmer and app-developer.
Recalling Michel Gondry or Charlie Kaufman, the opening stretch of An American Pickle is thoroughly delightful, rife with absurdist humor and amusing bits played for tender laughs. There’s a fun joke sweeping the science of Herschel’s miraculous preservation right under the rug, and the film goes right for the heartstrings as Ben recounts how he lost his parents to a car accident while Herschel laments the loss of his beloved Sarah and the child he never got to know. While not gut-bustlingly funny, we’re quickly pulled in by Rogen’s winsome performances - Herschel’s old-world sensibilities and adherence to religion stand in sharp contrast to Ben’s millennial apathy, setting up the narrative’s primary conflict naturally and expediently. At first, Herschel is wowed by Ben’s spacious apartment and modern-day luxuries, blown away by the ease at which his wildest dreams of seltzer are fulfilled by a simple Sodastream machine. But it isn’t before long that cracks in this newfound relationship begin to form: Ben becomes increasingly irritated by Herschel’s stubbornness and insistence on tradition, while Herschel is appalled at Ben’s lack of piety and roll-up-your-sleeves gumption in making something of himself.
“Attempting to balance its comedy with a character-driven study on discovering your roots, [An American Pickle] gets muddled in subplots that bring its momentum to a screeching halt.”
Unfortunately, this is where An American Pickle loses its way. Attempting to balance its comedy with a character-driven study on discovering your roots, the film gets increasingly muddled in subplots that bring its momentum to a screeching halt. After a particularly anger-fueled falling out with Ben, Herschel decides to strike out on his own, bringing his knowledge of brining to modern-day Brooklyn (rather unconvincingly portrayed by Pittsburgh), hocking artisanal pickles to hipsters and influencers. His pickle cart is an overnight sensation, which leaves Ben seething and feeling particularly resentful. Bizarrely, instead of digging deep and taking advantage of its fastidiously written character work, it’s here where An American Pickle becomes a different film entirely, switching gears to a painfully rote and unfunny game of oneupmanship between great-grandfather and great-grandson: Ben calls the city health inspectors on Herschel’s budding business, while Herschel snakes VC funding away from Ben’s app software. Bafflingly enough, it all devolves into a tepid and glib take on “cancel culture” as Ben entraps Herschel into revealing his antiquated and offensive thoughts on homosexuals, women, and the virgin birth of Jesus Christ. While the film’s sudden and jarring shift in tone is good for a few chuckles, it’s also punctuated by a particularly palpable aridness that makes even its 88-minute runtime seem long.
There’s a real potential to An American Pickle, but its inability to firmly plant its feet in any particular headspace - deciding whether it’s a comedy about an out-of-control prank war or a heartfelt dramedy about faith, family, and grief - hamstrings the film. The short novella by Simon Rich that the movie is based upon, Sell Out, grapples with its themes much more coherently, and it’s odd that Rich’s screenplay doesn’t fully translate the best parts of his own source material. An American Pickle is far from a dud, but the way it leaves so much on the table is disappointing; however, it does give us some of Seth Rogen’s most heartfelt and nuanced work to date. It’s just a shame that the story can’t live up to the performances.
