My hope for An American Pickle is that its combination of comedy and darkness will become more appropriate over time. However, I can’t say it worked completely for me after a first visualization.
The pieces are here! Seth Rogen’s adorable fume character has felt intensely connected to my own life experience. The same goes for its distinctly “Jewish” peculiarities and peculiarities. In addition, it is said that part of his role in the original HBO Max is to channel the unforgettable functionality of Fiddler on the Roof of Zero Mostel. The other part is more productive characterized as “a Middle-aged New York technician”.
Each of these elements appeals to my tastes; all in combination seems to be the best recipe for summer laughs. And again.
The premise puts Rogen in a dual role: it’s Ben Greenbaum, an app developer who suffers in the fashion world; and Ben’s own ancestor, Herschel Greenbaum, an employee of an Eastern European pickle factory who spends a hundred years submerged in brine after an accident, as a kind of semitic version of Captain America.
Herschel wakes from his brine-induced sleep in a radically replaced world, in which Ben is his only living relative. Our eternal boy temporarily learns that his big dreams for a filthy circle of Greenbaum relatives did not materialize precisely with Ben, a fashion business hermit who is so directed at his request that he has no meaningful friends or relationships.
It’s an absurd premise, but the film recognizes it easily and even looks at it. In a scene from the first press convention after Herschel’s breakdown, the discussion fades into the background after a reporter wonders how the hell this ridiculous “survived a hundred years in the saltwater brine!” the situation is possible. Instead of hearing the explanation, we see how the nascent popularity settles in the press body as a voiceover tells us, essentially, to accept it.
And that’s what we’re doing.
It’s a less difficult leap thanks to the smooth and significant connection that develops between the two Rogens, Herschel learns about Ben’s fashion society while emphasizing his own strong ties to the circle of relatives and religion with a suddenly genuine great-grandson. This honest fact dynamic is also helping Rogen to act in front of himself in each and every scene.
That’s where Pickle will locate his crash that history has lost me. A series of increasingly implausible turns suddenly leaves Ben and Herschel faced as staunch enemies. Herschel inadvertently ruins the dreams of Ben’s app, so Ben sends his great-grandfather of the same age to pack up and live on the street. Herschel promises to become a successful businessman out of revenge.
This turn occurs in an increasingly intense eye-for-eye game between the two men, with a strong tendency to cultural observation and satire. Herschel’s street pickle trade, for example, is gaining momentum with New York’s social media-obsessed hipster set. We see Herschel picking up the discarded cucumbers and dirty pots in the trash to put them in brine. The hipster network calls this production procedure objectively rude “artisanal”. Of course.
The Battle of the Greenbaums provides An American Pickle with the artistic area to spread sneaky commentary on millennial hipsters, social media celebrities, the cancellation of culture and the unique flavor of cultural wars in the United States. Herschel’s centuries-old perspectives are precisely appropriate by current standards, so Ben discovers tactics to arm his great-grandfather who opposes him, for example, when he uses the opposite psychology to get Herschel and his critiques problematic on Twitter.
The comment itself is not a problem. An American pickle has strengths to make about fashionable life in the United States (although they are rarely ridiculous in the nose). But the shift from a soft and sincere, if completely absurd, openness to a bitter and observation rivalry creates a discordant narrative dissonance.
It’s Rogen who makes the story paintings at the end.
In some ways, An American Pickle is precisely the kind of smoke comedy around which Rogen has built a brand. The sense of absurd humor is tone in the same position even in the absence of grass. But Rogen specifically didn’t write or do this, and it shows. Simon Rich, who founded his script in his new “Sell Out,” uses a dark, sadistic look in the central clash that doesn’t really have compatibility with the same old Rogen trick.
It’s Rogen who makes the story paintings at the end. I didn’t care about the dark undertones in the central clash between Greenbaum and Greenbaum, however, double star performances bring maximum difficulty.
Herschel is an irreproachable substitute for the far-right flank of American cultural wars, a true “doesn’t know what he’s doing (but is he rarely very bad?”). Contrast study. And Ben are all the tired and troubled freelancers I’ve met (including my young self). He has a smart center and great confidence in his ideas, but he also has enough disappointment with global fashion to turn him into his ultimate shit attacks in front of his ancestor.
So yes, Rogen’s possible options as an actor contribute to a more coherent story, even amid strange and infrequently provoking twists. But those twists fill a mirror of the house of busy fun with an act of moment that feels deeply at odds with the family-centered tone of the first and third acts. Perhaps the playful remedy of America’s cultural wars is a little too close to harboring what they are, hopefully, the last days of Donald Trump’s presidency.
I’d like to think that An American Pickle is the kind of comedy you want time to absorb, like the vinegared snack mentioned in the title. But in the summer of 2020, with a global pandemic that paralyzes life, this playful and nervous remedy of the cultural wars that have reshaped American society for the worse simply doesn’t go very well.
An American Pickle is now airing on HBO Max.