Table Talk: An American Pickle (2020)

A fish out of water tale

Anders: In an era of bloated and overly self-referential comedy, An American Pickle is a refreshing and relatively straight-forward, if high-concept, comedy. The film is a take on the classic Rip Van Winkle tale, this time about a Jewish immigrant, Herschel Greenbaum (Seth Rogen), who lives in 1920 New York City and is preserved in pickle brine for 100 years, only to be revived in a transformed and unfamiliar present day where he meets his great-grandson Ben (also played by Seth Rogen). It’s a silly, though familiar concept, but the film does well with the richness of its comedic and thematic potential, injecting classic tropes such as the odd couple, the fish-out-of-water, and the man out of time with good natured and timely humour.

Aren: There’s so much that’s conventional about An American Pickle, from the time-spanning high-concept to the fish-out-of-water humour, which has elements of Borat and Woody Allen’s Sleeper to it. But the conventional approach is very appropriate to this kind of story and even refreshing in an era when streaming services allow filmmakers to make bloated, unwieldy films about simple concepts. Furthermore, it mines some funny gags about the historical discrepancies between Herschel’s time and Ben’s time. I greatly enjoyed some of these gags, such as Herschel making pickles with dirty jars, discarded cucumbers, and rain water, and Brooklynites fawning over their artisanal value—because of course—or Herschel handily constructing a cart out of abandoned goods, showing how resourceful he is compared to modern people.

But the conventional narrative, which follows Herschel as he adjusts to the modern day, becomes famous, and then squanders that fame, goes beyond jokes. It allows the filmmakers to zero in on the specificity of the characters and their existential challenges without having to worry too much about an innovative narrative. Rogen and his fellow filmmakers, including director Brandon Trost and writer Simon Rich, are not trying to reinvent narrative comedy with their approach. So instead, they can bring something genuine to the film’s themes about religion and loss.

What does it mean to be Jewish and not religious?

Aren: Beyond the jokes about pickles and the silly name of Ben’s ethical shopping app—“Boop Bop”—An American Pickle addresses the existential question of how does a person remain connected to their culture without the beliefs and rituals that underpin that culture? Herschel is a religious Jew and he is mourning for his wife, Sarah (Sarah Snook), who died while he was pickled in that Brooklyn factory. Ben is a secular Jew who is mourning for his parents, who died in a car accident a few years earlier. Both men are in mourning, but only Herschel has the tools to process that loss through his religion. Thus, the film is asking how do you mourn and stay connected to your culture and ancestors without ritual?

Anders: I was fairly impressed with the film’s development of its thematic interests. I think this starts to point to what is unique about the film, the fact that An American Pickle doesn’t take the easy modern-chauvinist route of merely mocking Herschel’s beliefs and values. In that sense, your Borat comparison is apt, because it’s about using this absurd character to reveal the blindspots in our own worldview, or our own prejudices and resentments, not to mock the character. If anything, An American Pickle makes a persuasive case for the value of religious practice, insofar as it shows us what we miss out on in rejecting faith and cultural practices wholesale.

It definitely takes a very Jewish approach to the question of religion, and I appreciated that specificity: its point is well-taken. Rather than quibble over the metaphysical reality of God, or the existence of the supernatural, the film asks explicitly how we as a culture and society manage to perform the act of mourning and remembrance of our ancestors, or any act of true significance, without religion to bind us together through ritual. Rather than have Ben’s modern sophistication baffle Herschel, it is Ben’s clear emotional trauma and loss of connection to his family and faith that has left him angry and alone, despite his carefully decorated Brooklyn apartment and abundance of seltzer water (the fact that SodaStream is itself an Israeli product is a nice added gag).

Weirdly, I felt like Rogen, who hasn’t shied away from criticizing and mocking religion elsewhere, seems to want to grapple with the legacy of his own Jewish heritage, and it’s clear he thinks there is value in it.

Aren: That’s it: Rogen seems to be grappling with something genuinely important to him. He’s quick to mock religion in his comedy, but he’s taking the cultural value and bond of religion seriously in this film. When Ben is deported to Schlupsk, he finds refuge in a synagogue and joins with others in saying kaddish. This then leads to the reconciliation between Herschel and Ben and the final scene where Ben joins Herschel in saying a prayer over Sarah’s tomb. He even adds an “Amen” despite not knowing the other words of the prayer; he’s come to understand its importance.

Showcase for Rogen

Aren: Beyond the religious themes, An American Pickle is mostly a showcase for Seth Rogen as a performer. While Rogen is unlikely to ever win an Oscar, he’s become a talented actor over the years. His performance as Herschel is probably his most impressive. But it’s also impressive that he’s playing the two key characters (aside from Sarah Snook in the prologue) and that the resulting film still plays as compelling drama, even though it’s one man playing opposite himself.

Anders: I was really impressed with Rogen’s performance here, especially as Herschel. It’s a showcase for how he’s developed as an actor in the last 20 years. Rather than simply relying on physical appearance, or even just a heavy accent, Rogen manages to make Herschel and Ben into distinct characters through their mannerisms, facial expressions, and their personalities. Even late in the film, when Herschel shaves his beard and poses as Ben, it’s clear that he’s Herschel and not Ben. I’m not saying it’s Jeremy Irons in Dead Ringers, but it’s an impressive performance that transcends a simple gag.

Aren: It’s especially interesting when you learn about the filmmaking process. Seth Rogen only played Herschel with the agreement that he could grow his own beard for the part. So they filmed all the Herschel parts first, and then Rogen shaved his beard, and he proceeded to film all the Ben parts. Which means that both performances were filmed completely out of sync, so Rogen was essentially playing to no one as each character. Obviously, this is inevitable when you have one actor playing two parts in the same scene, but I think it’s a testament to the actor, as well as the director and editor Lisa Zeno Churgin, that the scenes play as well as they do. You never feel like Ben and Herschel are the same person, even when they’re both shaved and dressed alike. And you never feel like Rogen’s two performances are isolated from the story as a whole. It’s nice work.

Short and structured

Aren: I cannot overstate how much I appreciate the fact that An American Pickle moves quickly and shifts from one idea to the next without wasting any time. It never restates any part of its theme, instead progressing and building along the logical line of its concept. It also escalates its humour and jokes, with one sequence building upon the last, but not repeating it. An American Pickle plays like this with Herschel becoming the social media pickle star, then being shut down by health inspectors. So he starts to diversify with a team of interns, but is cancelled for saying offensive things on Twitter. But then the conservative right rallies around him until he outs himself as hating Christians. The way that everything escalates is classic comedic structure, so it’s not innovative by any means, but so many modern comedies have no structure at all around their jokes. They just kind of shift from one bit to the next with no progression between them, so I appreciated that An American Pickle actually plays as a story and not just a comedic machine.

Anders: I liked how the film has such a light touch. Rogen and the creative team never invest anything with too much unnecessary detail. For instance, the film never attempts to try to even explain how Herschel could survive being “pickled,” and the scene in the film where it is addressed is set up with excellent comedic timing, playing off our expectations of films that strain to invest even absurdist settings with rigorous logic through exposition and techno-babble.

The film knows its genre and is content not to go too far into “world-building,” knowing that jokes often play on broad caricatures and stereotypes.

Aren: The result is that An American Pickle feels like a self-contained story and film, instead of just a bunch of sketches jammed together. It’s of a piece, both in terms of tone and theme. So while it’s a modest film, I do appreciate the accomplishment.

An American Pickle (2020, USA)

Directed by Brandon Trost; written by Simon Rich, based on his story “Sell Out”; starring Seth Rogen, Sarah Snook.

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