Two terrific turns for the price of one
By Robbie Collin
As the first studio film to be released theatrically in five months, An American Pickle arrives at crunch time. One month into the reopening phase, attendance levels at British cinemas are around 5 per cent of last August’s, and this Warner Bros comedy, the solo directorial debut of cinematographer Brandon Trost, seems unlikely to revive the box office single-handed. But it’ll do until the revival arrives.
Adapted by the young comic writer Simon Rich from his terrific short story Sell Out, this is a wittily conceived fish-out-of-water comedy with a premise sublimely stupid enough to stand with anything in the genre’s Eighties heyday, from Coming to America to Crocodile Dundee. opens in the bleak 1910s, when Herschel Greenbaum (Seth Rogen), a hardy, shaggy-faced Polish Jew, migrates to the US and takes a job at a pickle-brining factory in Brooklyn, New York, where one day he is accidentally sealed inside a vat mere seconds before the place is condemned.
One century later, he’s discovered, perfectly preserved, and decanted into the present – and while his beloved wife (Sarah Snook) is long dead, his great-grandson Ben (also played by Rogen) still lives in the same borough. Ben – the very embodiment of Herschel’s American Dream-chasing immigrant ambition – turns out to be a largely directionless thirtysomething hipster, who has spent the past five years of his life tinkering with an ethical grocery shopping app called Boopbop. His awful non-career is what dismays Herschel the most about his descendant, although his total lack of interest in his Jewish heritage come a close second. The contents of his refrigerator are probably third. “I’ve got macadamia milk, cashew milk, pea milk – they’re milking peas now,” the younger Greenbaum says, impressed, while his elder looks on, perplexed.
It soon becomes clear where this is going. Herschel’s authenticity is priceless, which means that Brooklyn immediately takes him to its heart along with his pickles, which these days qualify as artisanal. Meanwhile, Ben keeps clicking away in obscurity at his desk, and a clash of generational values breaks out in which both sides land some satisfying punches. Ben stealthily lays down some very modern rakes for Herschel to step on, one of which is encouraging him to open a Twitter account. After sharing some, ahem, early 20th-century views about women, homosexuals and the disabled, Herschel is torn down by cancel culture then hoicked aloft as a free-speech martyr.
Rogen is good in both roles, the various visual and staging techniques that allow him to act opposite himself are invisible, and the film delivers consistent amusement. But you only sense an attempt to reach for something more in a thoughtful coda that turns the story’s focus to Ben’s threadbare connection with his own ethnic roots. There is the whisper of a suggestion that Ben is quietly aware that even 100 years after his ancestors were massacred by Cossacks, his Jewishness is something that has to be sanitised. A bolder, spikier film might have really sunk its teeth into this.