An American Pickle (2020) **

 

What do you get when you take a beloved, comedic actor, give him a classic concept, and let him run with it? In this case, not much, really. “An American Pickle” is what happens when a performer takes a half-baked idea and forgets to put it back in the oven.

Seth Rogen plays 2 roles. The first is Herschel Greenbaum, a 19th-Century, Jewish laborer who immigrates to New York with his wife, Sarah (Sarah Snook). Working in a pickle factory, Herschel falls unnoticed into a vat of pickles. The factory closes down, life goes on, and no one knows what happened to Herschel until 2020, when someone opens the pickle vat and out pops Herschel, preserved by the salt. So it's basically an unfrozen caveman story.

In the 21^st Century, Herschel meets his only surviving family, his great-grandson Ben (also Seth Rogen). Ben is a struggling app developer, a typical metrosexual, and non-religious, so the two ultimately wind up butting heads. Herschel goes out on his own to make a living selling pickles, but being a fish-out-of-water turns out to have its challenges.

“An American Pickle” has some amusing moments, and there's no reason this concept shouldn't work, but the movie isn't that well-written. The jokes just really aren't all that funny. Seth Rogen also carries the whole movie on his shoulders, and maybe it could have benefited from some supporting players.

One thing I will say about the film is that it has a certain “Being There” quality. Herschel, the immigrant maker of artisanal pickles is initially a big hit with the urbanite hipsters. Then Ben sabotages him by encouraging him to share his thoughts on Twitter. Once New Yorkers get a load of Herschel's retrograde ideas on women and gays, he is persona non grata. At first, pissing off the Libtards makes him a hero with the conservatives, but then he offends them, too, becoming a complete pariah. As long as he was just Herschel the pickle man, people were happy to project their own values on him, and they loved his eccentricities. Once he starts sharing his political and religious beliefs with the world at large, people latch onto whatever he says that they don't like, forgetting everything they liked about him. There's a lesson there for us all.

2 stars out of 5