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Herschel and Ben move in together, and quickly shift from long-lost family tentatively forging a bond to bitter nemeses intent on destroying one another. (Herschel, accustomed to the dismal tribulations of peasant life in the fictional Eastern Europe country of Schlupsk, scoffs at Ben’s fixation on creating a mobile app named Boop Bop and his reluctance to outwardly mourn his dead family; Ben resents Herschel for ruining a business opportunity.) They feud. They reconcile. We laugh. (Mostly at Herschel, who gets all the best lines. He marvels over seltzer and extra pairs of socks with an infectious, unfettered glee. His rationale for being a shoo-in for running a pickle business is “I was pickle.”)
Occasionally, An American Pickle suffers from a sensation that pivotal scenes have been cut from the narrative; the way the men jump into a fairly vicious rivalry feels abrupt, as though a few moments of emotional connective tissue got excised. But the thread of leaning on family to process grief is touching, and Rogen manages to make Herschel and Ben’s longing to connect feel real. The movie is frequently funny, sometimes sweet, and never particularly deep, but it does have a uniquely odd relationship to time that gives it a peculiar extra layer. Call it the proprietary brine.
Simon Rich adapted the screenplay from Sell Out, and he made some substantial changes—in the original, the Ben character is named “Simon Rich,” and he’s a sniveling screenwriter rather than a good-hearted freelance mobile app developer—but what he didn’t change gives the movie an off-kilter feel. The Brooklyn stereotypes An American Pickle is trying to skewer might’ve been fresh when Sell Out was written, but they are now long past their expiration date, to the point where they’re distracting.There are jokes about too many types of non-dairy milks (“They’re milking everything these days!”), kombucha, and silly app names that could’ve been culled from Portlandia’s first-season reject pile. “Let’s go to Smorgasburg!” Ben chirps, babbling about jackfruit nachos. There’s an extended gag about keener college kids eagerly serving as unpaid interns, which comes off like a misguided attempt at ragging on millennials rather than anything resembling a spoof on Gen Z, who are the people in college today. And the north Williamsburg that Herschel conquers in 2019 is somehow still filled with bloggers and devoid of the finance bros and Australians who actually sunbathe in Domino Park nowadays. To make matters stranger, none of this is really necessary to the plot. Why doesn’t Herschel simply fall into the vat in 1913 and get awakened in 2013? The adjustments would’ve been simple enough to make. But oh well. An American Pickle is all the more interesting for its screwy universe where copies of A Field Guide to the Urban Hipster never stopped flying off shelves.
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