the times | Friday August 7 2020 1GT 7
Dead Ringer is on Amazon Prime,
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the article at thetimes.co.uk/artsWill Hodgkinson
laps up some Guinness p
James Marriott
joins the Obama fan club p
Carol Midgley
hails My Name is Kwame p
An American
Pickle
12A, 90min
{{{{(Seth Rogen is great as the bamboozled Jewish immigrant Herschel Greenbaum in An American Pickle
Seth Rogen takes
on two roles with
aplomb in this
fish-out-of-water
comedy, says
Kevin Maher
the big film
HOPPER STONE/SMPSPTime-travel tale with a pickle on top
T
he pitch for Woody
Allen’s Sleeper
described an ambitious
and sprawling comedy
epic that was to run for
more than three hours.
The story would begin
in New York in 1973
and there follow the misfortunes,
romantic and professional, of a
luckless health-food store owner,
Miles Monroe (Allen), before cutting
for an interval break at the 90-minute
mark, just after Monroe had been
cryogenically frozen. After the
interval the narrative was to resume
in the year 2173, with the rudely
reawakened Monroe facing a new and
disorientating world of fascist regimes,
robot slaves and oversized and
potentially lethal fruit (“I beat a man
insensible with a strawberry”).
That was the pitch, anyway. The
problem with the screenplay was
that all the great material was in
the second part of the story. Allen
realised this early on and ruthlessly
axed the entire first half of the film
(the screenwriting motto “Kill your
babies” applies), resulting in a sci-fi
comedy classic and one of the finest
movies of his career.
The makers of An American Pickle
have learnt the Allen lesson well. It is
Sleeper’s closest relative and focuses
on the fish-out-of-water exploits of
a bamboozled Jewish immigrant in
New York from 1919 called Herschel
Greenbaum (Seth Rogen), who wakes
up in a vastly different environment
after being preserved for a full century.The film, like Sleeper, is almost
entirely set in Herschel’s “future”, but
for a brief, and gorgeously realised,
pre-titles flashback sequence. The
jokes are in the clash of cultures,
attitudes and ideas. Comedy ensues.
The film is adapted by the Saturday
Night Live gag writer Simon Rich from
his drolly satirical New Yorker story
Sell Out, and is directed by former
cinematographer Brandon Trost, who
last year shot Extremely Wicked,
Shockingly Evil and Vile. Trost opens
the film with a formal flourish in a
pre-titles sequence that is set in the
eastern European shtetl of Schlupsk
in 1919 and introduces us to Herschel
and his poverty-stricken existence.
Everything unfolds within a
restrictive square frame, in cold greyblur-focus shots, and might have been
mistaken for an early FW Murnau
melodrama were it not for the
deadpan one-liners. For instance?
“Her name is Sarah. She is strong, and
she has all her teeth, top and bottom.”
That’s Herschel’s description of his
dream girl, played by Sarah Snook
from Succession. “Sometimes when
we want to be alone, we go to a very
special bog,” he continues, with an
accent thick as Borat, yet infused by
a deeply ingenuous delivery.
The couple flee to New York, where
on arrival in Ellis Island Herschel
waxes lyrical about the freedoms
offered by the American dream
before immediately encountering an
immigration official, who barks, “All
right, this way, you filthy Jews!” Thesatire is already biting and we haven’t
even hit the opening credits.
Herschel is employed by a New
York pickle factory, falls into a giant
vat of brine, is pickled for a hundred
years, then wakes up unscathed,
untouched by time, and delivered into
the hands of his great-grandson Ben
(also Rogen), a taciturn app designer
living alone in the modern hipster
haven that is contemporary Brooklyn.
The film proper begins.
The jokes almost write themselves.
Herschel’s ancient brown Schlupsk
attire, with generous beard, is
admired by millennials for being
achingly “vintage”. He refers to an
androgynous female shop assistant
as “little boy”, while an iPad is a
“magic rectangle”. Yet Rogen, in
his most versatile performance to
date (there’s a dash of Peter Sellers
in the bravura double role), adds
genuine pathos to each punchline.
When he realises, for example, that
his great-grandson possesses more
than two dozen pairs of socks, his
eyes almost spill over with pride as
he gushes: “Ben Greenbaum. Owner
of 25 pair of sock? Wow!”
There’s trouble ahead, of course,
as Herschel and Ben eventually clash
over Ben’s sedentary existence and
his stubborn refusal to engage with
his Jewish faith, and over Herschel’s
bizarrely successful commercial
venture — he makes and sells
artisanal pickles because, as he
notes: “I have knowledge of business.
I was myself a pickle!”
There is a slightly disengaged
section in the middle, including
ho-hum potshots at social media and
cancel culture, where you can feel
Rich and Trost stretching the limits of
their slim source material to breaking
point. Thankfully, though, they rally
for a rousing climax.
All gags are finally stowed, and
here the film dares to ask bold and
possibly unfashionable questions
about the nobility of heritage and
the nurturing value of tradition.
It is touching to note, without
spoiling anything, that the movie
ends on prayer.
In cinemasTHE
CRITICS
In classic storytelling tradition, from
Dumas to The Parent Trap, Edith
assumes Margaret’s identity, but
only after murdering her.
The film, nimbly directed by
Casablanca’s dreamy hunk Paul
Henreid, is an ingenious test of
audience sympathy. We want Edith
to triumph, and to escape punishment
(enter the annoyingly persistent
police sergeant played by Karl
Malden), but, well, she’s a psychopath.
Wonderfully morally ambiguous.The inimitable Bette Davis is at
her “Baby Jane” finest here, acting
with huge rolling eyes and flat-out
screaming. She plays estranged
fiftysomething twins, the “good yet
poor” Edith Phillips and the “bad yet
rich” Margaret DeLorca, who are
reunited at the funeral of a love rival. Bette Davis plays murderer and victimOur critic Kevin Maher
continues his weekly film
club with a Bette Davis hit
Film Club
Dead Ringer