An American Pickle

An American Pickle
Starring Seth Rogen, Sarah Snook, Eliot Glazer, Jorma Taccone
Directed by Brandon Trost

There are some actors that are typecast for a specific role.  You can't see a Daniel Radcliffe movie and not think of Harry Potter.  Orlando Bloom will always be Legolas.  Hugh Jackman has managed to branch off his Wolverine role but is still mostly recognized by that.  Then there's actors who are typecast for their specific genre.  Robert Englund is horror.  Sylvester Stallone is action.  Seth Rogen is stoner R-rated raunchy comedy.  Then there's moments when an actor who's typecast for a specific genre branches out and does something uniquely different, and it's either a huge hit or massive flop.  In Seth Rogen's case with "An American Pickle," it's a huge hit for the actor, but the product itself is rather mediocre.

In 1919, Herschel Greenbaum (Seth Rogen) and his wife Sarah (Sarah Snook) migrate from their small shtetl in Eastern Europe to America to live out the American dream, and Herschel gets a job at a pickle factory.  One day he falls into a vat of pickles and is unknowingly sealed inside before the company is condemned, leaving him trapped in the pickled brine for one hundred years until he's finally freed.

Emerging into a new world in 2019, Herschel realizes that his wife is gone, he's in a strange land with big buildings and non-horse drawn carriages, and apparently no next of kin - until he discovers he has a great grandson Ben (Seth Rogen), who's working on a new app called Boop Bop but isn't very successful.  He lives alone, has no friends, and his parents passed away in a car crash, so he takes Herschel in to try and find a sense of family, but he's also very reserved in talking about family due to the pain of his parents' deaths.  He reluctantly takes Herschel to the family plot, and Herschel is shocked to discover it's in disarray and a big billboard is advertising Russian vodka (he hates the Russians) right behind Sarah's grave, and gets into an altercation with some construction workers.

Ben is angry that Herschel put him in this predicament, and kicks him out of his apartment, leaving him to fend on his own.  Thinking Herschel won't achieve anything, Ben goes back to trying to sell his app, but is shocked to learn Herschel has become a successful pickle business and earns enough money to take the billboard down and clean up the cemetery.  Jealous of his success, Ben sets out to destroy Herschel's business and reputation, leading to the two family members becoming bitter rivals who try to one-up the other as their antics slowly escalate to dangerous proportions.

"An American Pickle" is itself quite a pickle - it's a very short film (88 minutes), it doesn't really offer anything outstanding or memorable, but it's anchored by a surprisingly strong and emotional performance by Seth Rogen in a duel role.  To say the entirety of the movie rises and falls on this one actor is no exaggeration, and it's this performance that elevates it to something totally unforgettable.

The film comes from a short story written by Simon Rich, and basically centers around the American dream if the person dreaming it literally came from the 1910s.  Herschel and Sarah come to America to find the dream, and instead find a normal life, but it's seemingly perfect for them - until Herschel falls into the pickle brine and is stuck in stasis like Captain America for one hundred years.  One of the most funniest moments of the film happens after he emerges and they hold a news conference with a doctor, and a reporter says it's impossible that this happened, until the doctor showed a graph that literally made no sense, and everyone accepted it as fact.  I laughed out loud at that, and there's a few other moments in the film I found myself chuckling as well, mostly due to Rogen's play off himself.

The main focus of the film is on the battle between Herschel and Ben, which in itself feels really strange and nonsensical.  Sure, the film highlights the vast differences of cultures between the two men, but it feels needlessly cruel since neither man is inherently bad.  Herschel appears to be sexist, racist and intolerant of differing religions, but that's how people of his time talked and felt - it's not necessarily bad, just counter-culture to today's hyper-sensitivity, but he's made out to be the bad guy (sometimes, when he's not actually being praised for his actions).  Likewise, Ben is your stereotypical modern-day single guy: no friends, no family, living in a loft apartment, and spending all his time crafting an app in hopes of making it rich.  His vendetta against Herschel is cruel and mean-spirited, and while he wants to make Herschel out to be the bad guy, it's Ben that gets the most negative reaction - until we find the real motive, which turns everything around again and makes both men into good people.

The entirety of the film, as stated earlier, rests on Seth Rogen's shoulders.  Sure, he's no Daniel-Day Lewis who literally disappears into his role, but he plays both Herschel and Ben with self-assurance and also a knowledge of who each character is.  Herschel is your typical Jewish man from the 1910s in his speech (he maintains a Yiddish accent throughout and is actually really good with it), mannerisms, and fish-out-of-water approach to life (he doesn't know what Twitter is, but thinks he'll be able to master it, to Ben's devilish delight), as well as his salt-of-the-earth hard-working demeanor. 

This is a stretch for Rogen, who's better known for playing the modern-day stoner role, which is why Ben seems to be more effortless for him, even though Ben's not a stoner (the fact that this is Rogen's first non-R rated Rogen-produced film), he is your modern day tech guy right down to the glasses and scruffy beard.  Yet there's a deeper emotional thought to Ben's story, and Rogen slowly flushes it out throughout the film's runtime to the final denouement that'll leave you teary-eyed and shocked that these emotions can come from someone like Seth Rogen, who clearly deserves recognition for this powerful duel performance.

Stepping out of his normal role and tackling not one but two performances, Seth Rogen elevates "An American Pickle" from something mediocre to something magical, a small film that has a big heart.

The Score: A