The inspired premise of “An American Pickle” (coming to HBO Max this Thursday) immediately invites a vast range of imaginative possibilities. Directed by Brandon Trost and written by Simon Rich—based on his own series of Web pieces in The New Yorker—the movie is a New York Jewish twist on the Rip Van Winkle theme. It stars Seth Rogen in a double role—first, as Herschel Greenbaum, a poor young Jewish man from the Eastern European shtetl of Schlupsk, where he’s in danger of drowning in clichés. He and a young woman named Sarah (Sarah Snook) marry and emigrate to the United States, seemingly in the nineteen-tens. They live in Brooklyn, where Herschel has a miserable and poorly paid job killing rats in a pickle factory; in 1920, the thirtyish laborer accidentally falls into a vat of pickles, moments before it’s sealed and the factory is shuttered. In 2020, the vat is still in the now abandoned factory—and Herschel emerges from it, perfectly preserved and intact, exactly as he went in.
In Rich’s short story, Herschel is thrust unceremoniously (and also without any detail) into the tumult of modern-day Brooklyn. The movie, however, offers a fine and promising twist: inevitably, the revenant from the brine becomes a celebrity of sorts, an instant big news story; the authorities, discovering Herschel’s legal identity, also find that he has one living descendant, a thirtyish great-grandson named Ben Greenbaum (also Rogen), who is, in effect, his identical great-grandson. (Their only difference is Herschel’s short but untamed beard.) Privatizing the problem of Herschel, officials deliver him to Ben, a jovial yet solitary app developer—working on one app, Boop Bop, that will rate companies on ethics and give consumers access to the numerical rating, and for which he’s counting on a generous venture-capital sale.
Conveniently, Ben is an orphan—an only child whose parents were killed in a car accident in 2014—and apparently has no extended family. For his part, Herschel learns that Sarah died long ago, as did their son, Mort (who was born after Herschel’s brining). The scant yet nonetheless droll details of Herschel’s reëmergence—his contact with officialdom, with media, with modern medicine—hold out a promise that the movie doesn’t deliver. In 1920, Herschel would have known skyscrapers and movies, records and automobiles and airplanes; he’d have known of the Great War and the flu pandemic. The New York of Jewish immigrants was turbulent, complex, emotionally strenuous (see Henry Roth’s 1934 novel “Call It Sleep,” in which the writer, born in 1906, evokes his childhood through the eyes of a fictional child); Herschel’s bland simplicity suggests the opposite, a dull and featureless past. Moreover, what he wouldn’t have known was his son and his grandson—but he hardly asks Ben anything about the family, and Ben volunteers nothing more.
There’s something else that Herschel wouldn’t have known, and it’s all the stranger given that (spoiler alert) the movie takes a brief detour to Schlupsk: he wouldn’t have known of the Holocaust, of the fact that more or less everyone he’d grown up with would have been exterminated by the Nazis. Yet not a word, not a hint, of the Holocaust appears in “American Pickle”; the anti-Semitic violence that does get referenced—the Cossacks whose marauding in Schlupsk prompts Herschel and Sarah to emigrate—is played for laughs.
Rogen’s comedic career has become dominated by an ethical focus, even an ethical obsession, that, in the desire to convey good values with good humor, has lost its spice, its risk, its sense of human trouble. As a result, his comedy has become filtered, replacing a wide purview and the possibility of wild emotion and loose-ended impulse with schticky tropes. “An American Pickle” is framed as a picaresque adventure, and it touches on details of contemporary life only in order to lampoon their peculiarities. The satirical light that Herschel’s perspective brings to bear on current events is narrowly focussed and dim with sentiment and piety, nodding at “Fiddler on the Roof.” Instead, the movie breezes by the manifold specifics of current affairs that it references in order to reach the small set of points it is most interested in underscoring.
Those points become apparent early on, when Herschel obliviously manages to make a mess of Ben’s sales pitch for Boop Bop. The two men argue, and Herschel goes off on his own, living homeless (another grievous social ill played as an inconsequential joke). Using his one acquired bit of professional knowledge from before his brining, he then manages to become an overnight success as an artisanal pickle vender on the streets of Williamsburg. Yet, in the process, he has to negotiate the price of fame—and it’s here that the movie’s satire kicks in.
Though Herschel, in Schlupsk, appears to be a gentle and tender soul whose big dreams remain sweetly modest, he’s revealed, in his 2020 incarnation, to be what’s called in Yiddish a bulvan: a boastful loudmouth, an aggressive know-it-all. His obstreperous manner matches impulsive violence, reckless vanity, overweening pride, ethnocentricity, and other attitudes that are not, so to speak, P.C., and are no longer acceptable, at least in Ben’s circles. But Herschel also possesses ferocious willpower—a rage to survive, to thrive, to prosper, to triumph—that comes off, in the movie’s view, as the embarrassingly bare-toothed mark of off-the-boat immigrant ancestors who, handed nothing, fought their way brutishly for a toehold on the American Dream—and whose descendants, educated and polished and bourgeois-ified, find them an embarrassment.
This myth of the immigrant who’s willing to take on grossly unpleasant work in order to survive—and who, with pluck and determination, leaps from there to shining success—is presented unchallenged. In Rich’s short story, the arrival of Herschel (there called Herschel Rich) turns out to be a touchstone for the depressingly bourgeois-hipster world of his great-great-grandson, named Simon Rich, a Brooklyn-based Hollywood script doctor who’s besotted with ego and celebrity. Though the New Yorker piece “Sell Out,” which Herschel narrates, is filled with exaggerated comedic impossibilities, it retains an acerbity of detail (suggested even in its title) that threatens, like the pickles, to curl the teeth. (“That is why you do not care about money,” Herschel declares. “Because you already have so much of it. For you, all of life is happy game.”) The movie “An American Pickle” performs a remarkable, sentimental reversal: its subject is Ben’s reconciliation not only with Herschel, personally, but with his set of ideas. In effect, what Ben must reconcile with is more than his personal past; it’s the collective cultural past of racism, misogyny, homophobia, and other unchallenged modes of prejudice. It’s this reconciliation, the overcoming of the notion of apologizing for or being embarrassed by the recent cultural past, that “An American Pickle” strains to achieve.
Herschel’s celebrity appears borrowed from the Peter Sellers character in “Being There”—his plain and gruff utterances are interpreted by the sensation-hungry media as profundities. Yet along the way, he confronts the power and the disgrace of celebrity, and faces a far wider range of modern torments. In addition to reaching for little satirical nods to today’s sordid Presidency, “An American Pickle” pivots on a critique of cancel culture, left and right (suggesting that that the former is peevish, the latter is violent—and abetted by the force of law). It’s revealing to see which of Herschel’s struggles the movie plays for comedy or tosses off as mere plot devices: not only homelessness but arrest, incarceration, weaponized deportation and its aftermath. The focus of “An American Pickle” remains the world of media; to Rogen, the practical challenges and real dangers that a current-day immigrant might face remain abstractions. The entire movie is Boop Bopped: its ethical characteristics are revealed as disembodied and impersonal.
