Seth Rogen is a great improvisational performer, but it’s tough to improvise when your only scene partner is yourself. That might be one reason why An American Pickle, in which Rogen plays both lead roles (and is the only actor in the movie with more than a handful of lines), is such a comedic dud. It may also be that writer Simon Rich’s wry, smug sense of humor is a poor fit with Rogen’s gregarious goofball persona. Just as actors have struggled for years playing surrogate versions of Woody Allen in many later Allen movies, Rogen seems out of place as the movie’s version of Rich, who made himself the main character in the short story An American Pickle is based on.
Instead of Simon Rich, the main character of An American Pickle is Ben Greenbaum (Rogen), an aspiring app developer and Brooklyn hipster who hasn’t achieved anything of note in his life. The movie opens with the story of Ben’s great-grandfather Herschel Greenbaum (also Rogen), who left the fictional Eastern European country of Schlupsk in 1919 to build a better life for himself and his wife Sarah (Sarah Snook) in the United States. Herschel found a job in a Brooklyn pickle factory, and just before the factory was condemned, he fell into a vat of pickle brine, where he was somehow preserved for 100 years before being discovered and reawakened in 2019.
Herschel emerges into a world he doesn’t understand, in which his only remaining living relative is Ben (conveniently, the two are now the equivalent of the same age). Rich (who wrote the screenplay based on his 2013 short story "Sell Out"), glosses over the fantasy elements of Herschel’s amazing preservation ("It satisfies everyone," Herschel says in voiceover about the supposed scientific explanation for his miraculous condition), and An American Pickle isn’t much of a story about a man out of time discovering the modern world. Instead, it’s mostly a weak satire of hipsters and the already played-out idea of "cancel culture," as Herschel’s old-world views clash with Ben’s modern progressive sensibilities.
At first, the two are excited to connect with their only living family (Ben’s parents both died in a car crash several years earlier), and Herschel comes to live with Ben in his apartment. But after some wide-eyed moments of wonder, and his first chance to drink seltzer (which was his lifelong dream), Herschel develops contempt for the spineless Ben, who’s been tinkering with his only app idea for five years and has abandoned his Jewish faith. After a misunderstanding between Herschel and some construction workers gets both Greenbaums arrested, tanking Ben’s chances with a major venture capitalist (Jorma Taccone), great-grandson and great-grandfather turn on each other. They spend the rest of the movie as bitter enemies.
For Herschel, that means proving he can succeed without Ben, starting his own pickle business ("I was myself a pickle," he reasons) with discarded produce, used jars and rainwater, which attracts a hipster fan base for its "artisanal" qualities. When Herschel’s business goes viral, Ben tries to take him down from afar, eventually showing the internet the truth of Herschel’s appalling (yet period-appropriate) views. By the time the movie gets to Kanye West defending Herschel’s right to free speech, it’s completely lost whatever quirky charm it started out with. Rogen plays Herschel as a stern, unpleasant peasant and Ben as an insecure whiner, and while he effectively differentiates the characters, neither one is appealing or particularly funny.
The social commentary is tired and inconsistent, and it fits poorly with the movie’s ostensible spiritual message about Ben reconnecting to his Jewish heritage via Herschel, and coming to terms with the death of his parents. That’s heavy stuff for a movie that’s mostly about Rogen putting on a bushy beard and a funny accent, and the dueling-Greenbaums bit feels like something Adam Sandler would come up with. Because there aren’t really any characters for the Greenbaums to interact with (a few business associates show up for a scene or two each, and even Sarah barely gets any screen time before Herschel is pickled), the story comes off as insular and repetitive, going through the same cycle of recrimination and forgiveness between Rogen's two characters.
The satire falls flat, and the odd-couple dynamic between Ben and Herschel is like a subdued version of 1980s sitcom staple Perfect Strangers. With no other actors to riff with, Rogen seems lost, staring at stand-ins for himself as he delivers Rich’s twee, fussy dialogue. Director Brandon Trost, a longtime cinematographer who’s worked on numerous Rogen projects, shoots the movie like a sitcom, never capturing the amazement that Herschel must feel at encountering the modern world or the exaggerated absurdity of his journey to becoming a celebrity. The pacing is awkward, rushing through major narrative shifts as it heads toward a running time under 90 minutes. The filmmakers present the story as a sort of fable, complete with lessons about family and spirituality, but it’s more of a deadpan comedy sketch that doesn’t know when to end.
Starring Seth Rogen, Sarah Snook, Jorma Taccone, Molly Evensen and Eliot Glazer, An American Pickle premieres Thursday, August 6 on HBO Max.