96 Time August 17/August 24, 2020
even as our poliTical landscape has become over-
loaded with ridiculously wrongheaded pronouncements,
comic absurdity in the movies—dumb, or even smart, stuff
that just makes you laugh—feels more precious than ever.
We’ve all become worried Victorian orphans facing our glum
future. RIP delight; it was nice while it lasted.
But wait! Seth Rogen as an early 20th century pickle-
company grunt who falls into a vat of brine and emerges, per-
fectly preserved, in modern-day Brooklyn? Did someone ac-
tually conceive that as a movie idea—let alone get the thing
made? The good news for you and for me, my fellow wan Vic-
torian orphans, is that An American Pickle is a real movie, and
it’s delightful. Sometimes a logically indefensible premise is
the only thing that makes life seem logical.
Rogen plays a dual role here: He is, first, Herschel Green-
baum, a native of the Eastern European region of Schlupsk,
a land of mud and hardship. We first meet Herschel in 1919,
as he woos a local girl, Sarah (Sarah Snook). “She has all her
teeth, top and bottom,” he notes approvingly. Both have tragic
backgrounds, alluded to in dashes of black humor—“Her par-
ents were murdered by Cossacks, my parents were murdered
by Cossacks!”—and when yet more violence strikes their vil-
lage, they set out for America, eager to start a family that will
stretch forth through generations.
Then Herschel falls into that vat. He awakens, still wearing
his rumpled cap and sporting his scraggly beard, to learn that
his beloved wife is long dead; his feelings of displacement stir
anger in his heart. Then he learns he has one living relative,
a great- grandson, Ben Greenbaum
(Rogen again). Ben whisks Herschel to
his nerd- bachelor Brooklyn apartment,
introducing him to the wonders of Alexa
and the miracle of SodaStream (seltzer
was an unaffordable luxury in the old
country), as well as teaching him the new
dance steps, though Herschel has retained
some pretty fly Fiddler on the Roof moves.This is the assertively heartwarming
part of An American Pickle. But not to
worry, it doesn’t last long. Herschel is
Ben’s only connection to family: Ben’s
father, Herschel’s grandson, has died
in a car crash, as has Ben’s mother. But
before long, Herschel and Ben—a failed
app developer who also, it appears, har-
bors anger in his heart—have a falling-
out. Herschel strikes out on his own and
becomes a pickle-cart mogul. Ben, jeal-
ous and spiteful, tries to sabotage him.
It becomes clear that neither is par-
ticularly nice, and certainly not to each
other. Yet their faults unite them, and
their stumbling odyssey back toward
each other is what gives An American
Pickle its spiky warmth.
Directed by Brandon Trost and
adapted by Simon Rich from his own
novella, “Sell Out,” An American Pickle
has an acidic zing that neutralizes
any sentimentality. Rogen has a great
feel for Yiddish humor, for its lilt-
ing rhythms and its joy, but also for its
bleakness. (When Herschel learns that
Ben has lost his parents, he says, with
genuine compassion, “I’m very sorry,”
before asking, “Murder, or regular?”)
But Rogen can carry the movie’s more
serious threads too: while Ben claims
that he’s not religious, he comes to un-
derstand that even among the non-
observant, religion can be the thread
that connects families through centu-
ries. Rogen, Trost and Rich have a sense
of how ridiculous, and sometimes pun-
ishing, life can seem, in 1919 or in 2020.
Yet even without the advantage of being
preserved in brine, we get through the
madness. L’chaim.AN AMERICAN PICKLE streams on HBO Max
beginning Aug. 6TimeOff Reviews
◁
Rogen and Rogen: the pickle
doesn’t fall far from the treeMOVIES
A spiky delight straight
from the old country
By Stephanie Zacharek
‘Making
the movie
was kind of
re-enacting
my own
history in a
lot of ways.’
SETH ROGEN, on Marc
Maron’s WTF podcast,
reflecting on how his
own grandmother was
born as her family fled
Poland in 1919