An American Pickle
(Four stars)
Cert 12A, Sky Cinema/NOW, on demand
Herschel Greenbaum (a heavily bearded Seth Rogan) is a cheerful ditch-digger in a downtrodden shtetl in some corner of Eastern Europe. It is the inter-war years, and abject poverty as well as persecution by Russian Cossacks makes life in his mud-splattered village less than a bed of roses for Herschel’s Ashkenazi community.
Our hero wears the misery of his overcast life lightly, but nonetheless yearns for a more prosperous existence. When he lays eyes on Sarah (Sarah Snook), a brighter future opens up before him, and they duly wed. After the wedding, the pair find themselves the sole survivors of a Cossack pogrom, and take it as a sign to up sticks and flee to the US to start a new life.
Just off the boat, they encounter a New York of casual antisemitism but also paid employ. Herschel lands a job as a rat-clubber in a Brooklyn pickle factory. It’s not great work, but it’s work, nonetheless. With a baby on the way, Herschel vows to Sarah that even though they are near destitute, their children and their children’s children will flourish.
Up to this point, An American Pickle has been 10 or so minutes of lively “gloom comedy” where the bleakness of the couple’s homeland and the misery they are accustomed to is primarily the joke.
Things change up into a more fanciful gear when Herschel accidentally falls into a vat of pickling gherkins in the very same moment the factory is being shut down and condemned. A century flies by, the New York skyline rises up, and two local boys exploring inside the old
derelict building unwittingly release Herschel from a hundred years of pickled preservation.
The discovery causes a media flurry as Herschel is unveiled to the world during hospital tests. Although he must come to terms with the death decades previously of his beloved Sarah, he learns that he has a living relative in the city. Enter Ben (also played by
Rogan), his great-grandson.
What begins as a cordial and warm-hearted reunion across generations, soon turns to nothing but headaches for Ben as Herschel tries and fails to adapt to this bizarre new world that he has awoken in.
It is a well-worn device in comedies of this nature, the fish-out-of-water premise whereby everyday situations are alien obstacle courses for our uninitiated, old-country relic. Brandon Trost’s film somehow finds a way to tone down these encounters and stop them going all-out Borat.
The pair fall out when Herschel’s determination to reclaim Sarah’s cemetery plot leads to Ben being arrested, and thereby scuppering ambitions to find an investor for his tech start-up.
Enmity erupts between the two, and when Herschel’s back-alley pickle business becomes du jour with the Williamsburg hipster set (great fun is had as he experiences the gamut of social media culture, from frenzied hype to merciless cancellation), Ben sets out to sabotage him.
Written by one-time Pixar staff writer Simon Rich, and adapted from a short story based on himself and his own great-grandfather, An American Pickle manages to find and maintain a good tonal balance. It is a cartoonish satire that toys with the laws of the
universe to poke some fun at modern America and its relationship with its heritage.
At the same time, there is real heart on display here as it all plays out. The film never uses a cheap gag where something lightly edged with poignancy could be incorporated. In doing so, it comes to feel like an allegory about reconnecting with our roots (Ben’s parents have passed away, and he is a lapsed Jew with little or no interest in the culture of his forebears).
Trost – a cinematographer here directing his feature debut – had to film the entire production twice; the first time, with Rogan in his beardy, Slavic-peasant guise, and then again as the clean-shaven Ben character. It is all nicely wedded together
despite this, and much of the credit belongs to Rogan himself.
Sometimes dismissed as a loveable, stoner-comedy teddy bear, Rogan does sterling work here. Not only does he make both characters slot together comedically, he makes them hum with enough humanity that you forget that one has spent 100 years in vinegary suspended animation.
Behind some of this may be the fact that Rogan has said that Rich’s story is not unlike that of his own Jewish immigrant roots.
A bizarre but ultimately charming fable.
Sunday Independent