An American Pickle, the new Seth Rogen comedy streaming on HBO Max, kicks off with a funny idea. Long ago and far away, in the Eastern European shtetl of Schlupsk, the humble but hardworking gravedigger Herschel Greenbaum (Rogen) falls in love. He sets his eye on a local redhead, Sarah (Succession’s Sarah Snook), and what do you know, they have much in common. Both love the color black. Both aspire to riches: she, to earn “afford your own gravestone”-level money, and he, to someday take a carefree, luxuriant sip of seltzer water. Also: both of their parents were murdered by Cossacks.
On their wedding day: more Cossacks. And the annihilation of their entire village and way of life. All the more reason to hop aboard the USA Express and start new lives elsewhere, in the land of the free.
Things don’t quite work out as anticipated, but you had to see that coming. This Rip Van Winkle-esque tale, directed by Brandon Trost and written by Simon Rich after a novella he published in the New Yorker in 2013, has some fish-out-of-water trickery up its sleeve. Herschel’s going to start working at a pickle factory--not doing any of the pickling, mind you, but rather clobbering its infesting rats. The rats, in turn, scare Herschel off of a ledge and into a pickling vat, where he waits—a human pickle—for one hundred years.
Flash forward to the present and you have yourself a movie in which a Jewish immigrant from 1919 wakes up in the Brooklyn of 2019, with its child-friendly drones and Alexa playlists, its kombucha and cashew milk. This is a present day in which Herschel apparently only has one living relative, which is a bummer, and it’s a double bummer for the guy in question—his great-grandson Ben (also Rogen), who’s developing an app—to prove somewhat disappointing. Odd couple isn’t the word.
Ben and Herschel are men of different eras, whose attitudes toward work, religion, and all else differ greatly. They share an entrepreneurial streak and an intense connection to family that proves worthy of the “Aww” moments it eventually inspires. But they don’t know that about themselves yet. What they do know is that despite being bonded by blood and, in theory, by history, and despite both being played by Seth Rogen, they are complete mysteries to each other. After some squabbling over things like cemetery upkeep and work ethic, they eventually go their separate ways: Ben to work on his app, Herschel to build a pickling business from the ground up, thieving recycled jars and brining discarded, trash-heap cucumbers in rainwater.
So far, so good. The premise lands. And Rogen is pretty good, particularly as Herschel, with his thick beard and accent, his oblivious know-how, his comical threats of vengeance on basically everyone who wrongs him. I would imagine that most of us, given the choice, would prefer to hang with Herschel than Ben for the span of an entire movie, if only because fish-out-of-water comedies—predicated on watching someone run the high risk of making a fool of themselves, maybe even put themselves in danger, at every turn—are generally a good hang.
And An American Pickle proves a pretty good hang. It’s straightforward, well-paced, has fun-enough cameos (Lonely Planet’s Jorma Taccone and comic Tim Robinson, to name two). But it also sells its premise quite a bit short. Half the joke, one would think, is that an industrious and devout Jewish immigrant from 1919 who wakes up in 2019 might have … some things to catch up on. And not just the fact that, thanks to Sodastream, he can now have all the seltzer water he wants.
The original Rip Van Winkle wakes up to learn, too late, that the American Revolution happened without him. Dangerous political missteps ensue when he pleads loyalty to the crown. An American Pickle nods to those missteps when Herschel, somehow thrust into the political spotlight, similarly puts his foot in his mouth and alienates basically every side of the spectrum. But the spectrum itself is missing: the sense that a Jewish man from 1919 might experience America in 2019 with anything but harrowed bemusement, or at the very least keen interest, is pursued in only the most perfunctory ways, with reheated-leftover humor.
The whole idea is that the world has changed. The world is also, always, dangerously on the verge of repeating its mistakes. As Pickle plays this out, however, the joke is ultimately on Brooklyn. So many of Pickle’s most intricate and involved gags are a rehash of the usual hipster self-critique, starting with a pair of gay Brooklynites with social media clout who mistake Herschel’s garbage-dump pickling process for some sort of out-there, weirdo artisanal fare. It’s a good joke until it starts to feel like the only joke, however many forms it takes. We get unpaid, overeager Columbia interns and hipster faddishness and tech bros with VC capital and nods to the power of social media. We get jokes we’ve made before, nestled into a story about the unfamiliar—jokes that are pleasantly accomplished, but which crowd the movie with a sense of missed opportunity regardless of how funny it sometimes is. This is a movie in which someone merely saying Smorgasburg—it’s a Brooklyn thing—is its own punchline.
But it’s not much of a punchline. Hipsters, am I right? What proves funnier is not any joke in the movie, but the strange sensation of watching a film that seems to be in denial about what it’s really about. Pickle has a canny way of edging toward something provocative and interesting before leaping back to safety and sentiment, as if it were playing hopscotch over a third rail. There’s a loud, hilarious political comedy cowering under its hood, but the sanded-down, fun-for-everyone pleasantry is so loud you can barely hear it… even as that harder-core, more free-wheeling film seems closer to the spirit of the situation the movie sets up. In one instance, you’ll get a funny Ellis Island bit in which a fresh arrival is extolling America’s open-armed mentality in the same moment that a customs officer is calling him and everyone like him a “filthy Jew.” In the next, the live wire of that joke—relevant enough to 2019 discourse for its serrated edges to nick us a little—dissipates as easily as if it had never happened.
So, instead: hipster jokes. Sodastream. Petty antics. It’s as tempting here to remind ourselves outright that Herschel wakes up in the Trump era as it is to push back and note that this movie doesn’t have to address that era. But the movie confuses its own purpose when Trump, who goes unnamed, creeps in around the edges nevertheless, and with little of the ironic follow-through the premise merits. The closest we get to a joke of real substance, real bite, is when a character born and raised in America gets deported to a homeland that he’s never even been to. You don’t need Trump to be name-dropped for the resonance to be apparent; a great political comedy would in fact not even need to mention the guy to land its knock-out punches.
But An American Pickle massages all the life and spice and danger out of jokes like these in favor of comparatively flavorless sentiment and reconciliation. Sure, I still laughed. But as I did, I wondered why the movie insisted on low-balling itself. I wondered why the range of strange encounters and insults and cultural displacement it offers felt so minimally-imagined. The movie is set in the historically Jewish neighborhood of Williamsburg. Surely we have more available to us, in such a set-up, than repurposed garbage comedy.
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