'American Pickle' review: Seth Rogen, twice, brings out the sweetness in an immigration fable
Aside from being the briniest film since the Lower East Side romance “Crossing Delancey” 32 years ago, “An American Pickle” (premiering Thursday on HBO Max) reminds us that Seth Rogen has always had the acting chops for more than one kind of comedy.
This one’s more than one kind of comedy, too. It’s a sweet yet nicely vinegary immigration fable; a deadpan fantasy; and a tale of two Brooklyns, one (1920) a repository of rat-infested factories and Eastern European Jewish immigrants, the other (2020) the gentrified land of their progressive, pea milk-drinking great-grandchildren.
Rogen plays what the old Hollywood studio publicity departments called “a demanding dual role.” In the land of Schlupsk, in 1919, Herschel Greenbaum works as a gravedigger faced with a near-perpetual landscape of mud true to the fictional country’s perfect name. Speaking in murmured broken English — the Old Country dialogue is subtitled Yiddish — Rogen relays Herschel’s courtship with a fellow villager (Sarah Snook). “Sometimes, when we want to be alone, we go to very special bog,” he says, not long before their wedding is cruelly interrupted by the arrival of “bloodthirsty, Jew-hungry” Cossacks.
While “An American Pickle” is a different sort of comic fable than Rogen’s best-known work, there’s enough of an edge to make it stick. With a child on the way, the Greenbaums pursue their new life in New York City, with Herschel employed as rat-catcher in the Capital Pickle Company. One untimely plunge into an enormous vat of salt water and cucumbers later, a century goes by as the condemned Brooklyn factory lays dormant. When Herschel emerges from the vat, miraculously preserved by the brine, the stage is set for a family reunion between he and his great-grandson. This is Ben, a struggling app developer, also played by Rogen.
You can feel the screenwriter, Simon Rich, and the first-time solo feature director Brandon Trost, struggling to determine precisely what sorts of funny they’re after. There’s more conflict and narrrative contrivance in the film than in the source material, Rich’s four-part story titled “Sell Out,” published by The New Yorker in 2013. (In that version Ben is a screenwriter and script doctor; Herschel’s impressed that he’s any kind of doctor.) As the film engineers its first big argument between the Greenbaums, setting the stage for a series of tit-for-tat revenge schemes, your heart sinks a little. Is this really what the movie’s going to do, storywise?
Well, it does, and it doesn’t. As Herschel hits his business stride, selling homemade pickles made from dumpster throwaway cucumbers in grubby jars, the foodie Brooklynites go wild, sending Ben into a jealous snit and undermining mode. But family is family. Herschel suffers his highs and lows, as Ben sticks to lows, and he comes to realize his barely-Jewish-anymore great-grandson needs him.
Shooting mostly in Pittsburgh in 2018, director Trost hasn’t yet discovered the joys of a mobile camera, but his individual, head-on compositions carry some weight and resemble ashen-toned tintypes of another era. (In addition to using a blur filter for effect, Trost plays with the screen’s aspect ratio, confining the 1919 scenes to a square 1:1 or thereabouts boxlike shape, evoking the silent film era.)
The premise requires Rogen to share scenes with himself — one bearded, looking like Tevye from “Fiddler on the Roof,” the other clean-shaven and looking slightly lost, as does the great-grandfather from another time. When they share the camera frame it’s generally low-fi, old-school fakery, with the real Rogen addressing a double shown only from the back. Such tricks allow us to relax into the deadpan absurdity of the premise. The way Rogen makes Herschel a wide-eyed product of his time and place, the movie retains a core of sincerity while scoring laughs off Herschel’s ingrained, brined-for-a-century attitudes. (”We sell to all peoples,” he says of his pickle business, “even woman.”)
All you had to do to see Rogen’s abilities beyond genial-stonerdom was to see the 2011 cancer comedy “50/50” or director Sarah Polley’s touching, prickly 2012 romance “Take This Waltz.” Unlike so many other screen actors trained in comedy, he’s a serious listener and a true inter-player. Even when he’s sharing scenes with Seth Rogen.
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‘AN AMERICAN PICKLE’
Three stars (out of four)
MPAA rating: PG-13 (for some language and rude humor)
Running time: 1:28
Premieres: Thursday on HBO Max
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