Brandon Trost

(On Cable TV, August 2020) I defy anyone to be able to tell where the next twenty minutes of An American Pickle are going to go at any given time, so quickly does this comedy go from one comic riff to another. The overall structure of the film is solid enough (Revived after a hundred years, a Jewish-American immigrant from Eastern Europe must learn to live with his great-grandson) and so is the central conflict, but then the film hops from one episode to another in ten-minute segments, touching up fish-out-of-water tropes, Brooklyn hipsterism, immigrant narratives, outrage culture, some political satire and then on to a less funny, more heartfelt but not undeserved ending. Seth Rogen plays the two principal roles, a conceit that works generally well. The jokes are amusing enough, and much of the humour is a blend between absurdist ideas clashing with the intrusion of reality when it makes the most comic sense. Director Brandon Trost keeps things hopping at a pace that keeps up with the episodes. While An American Pickle was released direct-to-TV in North America, it was meant as a theatrical feature and clearly feels as such. It’s not a bad milestone in Rogen’s career—double starring in a comedy that manages a good transition from laughter to sentiment. (There’s even a welcome absence of weed jokes here.) It’s not the first such film he’s headed, but it does help evolve his screen persona into something that can sustain him well beyond his initial slacker persona.