A man falls asleep and wakes up generations later to discover that everything around him has changed drastically. The story is as old as Washington Irving’s short story “Rip van Winkle,” first published in 1819. Actually, it is even older than that. The Babylonian Talmud, from about A.D. 500, tells a story about a legendary scholar and miracle worker named Honi the Circle-Drawer who fell asleep one day after a heavy meal and woke up 70 years later. Woody Allen riffed on this basic plot in his 1973 science fiction farce Sleeper, in which an owner of a health food store wakes up 200 years in the future after having been accidentally frozen, as did Jay Roach and Mike Myers in Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, in which a groovy British spy wakes up in 1997 after having been cryogenically frozen for 30 years.
Into this time-tested subgenre comes HBO Max’s An American Pickle, about a man who was preserved in pickle brine 100 years ago and wakes up in modern-day Brooklyn. But before we get to Brooklyn, we journey back to Schlupsk, a fictional shtetl-type village in Eastern Europe, where we meet Herschel Greenbaum (Seth Rogen), a down-on-his-luck ditch digger. Life is difficult for Greenbaum, but, one day, everything providentially changes for him. He meets Sarah, whom he decides to court because of how extraordinarily good-looking he finds her: “She has all her teeth: her top and her bottom.” Her dream is to one day be rich enough to afford her own grave; his is to one day be able to taste seltzer water. Like so many other Poles, Greeks, Jews, and Italians in the early 1900s, they decide to immigrate to the United States, eager for their shot at the American dream or, at the very least, to get away from the Cossacks.
In New York City, Herschel finds a job in a pickle factory. He’s not actually allowed near the pickles, though. His job is to chase rats, and he’s given a nickel for every 10 he smashes. “It is not dream job,” he says in his Yiddish-inflected, Russian-accented English. “But I am grateful for chance to prove my worth.” The couple’s existence is a meager one, but Herschel promises Sarah that one day, perhaps in 100 years’ time, the Greenbaums will be strong, powerful, and successful — “the strongest in the land.”
One day, while backing away from a particularly vicious-looking pack of rats, Herschel slips off a ledge and falls into a vat of pickles. Without anyone having noticed his plunge, the other workers seal the vat shut just as the factory is forced to shut down by the board of health.
We then flash-forward 100 years into the future, when two young boys playing with a drone near an abandoned factory come upon the century-old pickle vat. They unseal the vat, and out pops Herschel, rising up inside the vat like the Swamp Thing crossed with Frankenstein’s monster. A completely befuddled Herschel is brought before an even more befuddled team of reporters, who listen to a group of doctors trying to explain how Herschel could have been preserved in pickle brine for a century without having aged a single day.
Like Honi in the Talmudic story, Herschel is extremely saddened that everyone he once knew and loved is now gone. But unlike Honi, who is so aggrieved by this state of affairs that he asks God to remove him from the world, Herschel finds a reason to keep living. The doctors tell him that they’ve tracked down a living relative of his: Ben Greenbaum, a great-grandson, who happens to be the exact same age that he is. He imagines that his great-grandson will be “powerful, successful, the strongest in the land.”
Ben, also played by Rogen, is a beardless, bespectacled, and fully Americanized millennial. He fetches his great-grandfather from the hospital. As Herschel treads warily around the streets of 21st-century New York City, we get the expected scenes of him being perplexed and frightened by cars, scooters, skyscrapers, and other modern accouterments that a simple Schlupsk native couldn’t have imagined in his most hallucinatory fantasies. Other shocks include Alexa, Kombucha, interracial couples, the use of the word “dope” as an adjective, and, most fantastically for Herschel, his very own seltzer-making machine. Herschel is convinced that his great-grandson has become as powerful and as successful as he dreamed he would: “Twenty-five socks! Twenty-five! Ben Greenbaum,” he utters to himself in amazement. “Owner of 25 pair of sock.”
What do you possibly do for a living, Herschel asks him, to be able to afford such riches? You must be a doctor, right? Or a lawyer? “No, but close,” says Ben over a cup of homemade seltzer. “Freelance mobile app developer.” Try explaining that to the average person in 2020, let alone someone who’s been transported here from 1919.
After Ben is unable to sell his app to investors, in part thanks to Herschel’s interference, Herschel tells him he has an idea. How about he and his great-grandson open up a pickle business together? Pickle business “is good business. Jewish business. I have knowledge of pickling. I was myself a pickle.” When Ben refuses, Herschel indignantly vows to start a pickle business himself, disowns his great-grandson, and angrily storms out of Ben’s apartment. With Herschel now out of Ben’s watchful eye and out all alone on the streets of modern-day Williamsburg, his real challenge (and our real fun) begins.
Simon Rich’s consistently amusing screenplay (adapted from his own short story “Sell Out”) and Rogen’s wonderful performance in a challenging dual role combine to transform An American Pickle from a hackneyed spinoff into a very funny and occasionally profound film. Rogen has superb chemistry with himself, and even though his accent is less Tevye than Borat, especially in lines such as, “You will take down vanilla vodka, or I will do violence,” and, “I become huge success,” it is good enough, especially for a film designed to evoke more comedy than pathos. Not that this movie is lacking in feeling: An American Pickle is surprisingly poignant. By the end, it will have you ruminating on those mystic chords of memory we refer to as group identity and wondering, if you are a person of faith, “What do I really have in common with my great-grandparents other than my Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, or other beliefs and religious practices? And what will my great-grandchildren have in common with me other than my faith?”
Daniel Ross Goodman is a writer from western Massachusetts and a Ph.D. candidate at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. He is the author of Somewhere Over the Rainbow: Wonder and Religion in American Cinema and the novel A Single Life.
