An American Pickle is a red herring. Everything about it on the surface screams screwball comedy: there’s its zany premise, in which a man awakes in the present day after being preserved in pickle brine for a century. There’s also its star, Seth Rogen, whose filmography is a carnival of stoner hilarity and outlandish action. There’s also Rogen’s accent as pickled protagonist Herschel Greenbaum: a Borat-ish blend of Eastern European dialects and malapropisms. Add to this mix the movie’s setting — New York, home to a thousand memorable fish-out-of-water comedies, from Crocodile Dundee and Coming To America to The Muppets Take Manhattan and Elf — and you’d be forgiven for expecting a funny bone-clobbering, low-ball laugh-riot in which an outsider grapples with a world to which they don’t belong. But An American Pickle is not that movie, or rather, not just that movie.
Brandon Trost’s solo directorial debut finds Rogen fighting (quite literally) with issues around identity, ancestry and the sacrifices our forefathers made to give us what we take for granted today. On paper, it sounds wacky. In practice, it’s surprisingly poignant and powerful. The result is possibly the Pineapple Express funny-man’s most affecting film to date, and an impressive essay on the importance of understanding your roots.
It may not always succeed as a comedy but as a drama, this is the real dill.
Herschel Greenbaum is an amiable ditch-digger from a fictional village named Schlupsk, who dreams with his pregnant wife Sarah (Sarah Snook) of one day experiencing American luxuries like gravestones and seltzer water (“I want the bubbles to tickle my tongue,” swoons Herschel). They move to the Land Of Opportunity in search of these dreams, but an absurd accident soon leaves the proud Jew and seltzer enthusiast in a vat of pickles, perfectly preserving him for 100 years. The movie laughs at the ridiculous science of such a premise, then moves swiftly on, reconciling Herschel to his great-grandson, Ben – a frustrated app developer, also played by Rogen, yet to come to terms with the death of his parents (“How did they die? Murder or regular?” Herschel enquires).
What follows is a scattershot story spanning fights with construction workers, Twitter-related sabotage and a political campaign that jabs at the conditions in American culture that allowed Donald Trump’s rise to power. It’s not perfect: the screenplay, adapted from a short story by Pixar and Saturday Night Live alumnus Simon Rich, could mine the inherent comedy of Herschel’s situation more, and the film doesn’t always feel focused, straying at times from the central question that makes the film so compelling: what would it be like to meet an ancestor who risked everything so you could enjoy the life you live today? Whatever its faults, An American Pickle overcomes them with charm in abundance. It may not always succeed as a comedy but as a drama, this is the real dill.