Fiddler on the Roof Meets The Jerk

S eth Rogen may strike every fashionable left-wing pose in his public persona (lately suggesting that Israel should not exist), but socially observant comedy doesn’t work unless it rings true. Since the truth is conservative, and Rogen is good at his job, he keeps making conservative comedies.

Knocked Up teaches that a slacker who gets a girl pregnant should grow up, act like a man, and form a committed relationship with the mother of his child. Neighbors: You can’t keep partying like a college student when you have a kid, so stay home and look after your family, even if that makes you lame. Funny People: Having the ability to bed all the women you like won’t make you happy. The thread that ties together a lot of Rogen movies is: Grow up. His leading source of comic power seems to be the Jiminy Cricket on his shoulder, telling him and the cohort of clowning, dope-smoking Millennial manboys he represents that their values are messed up.

His latest, the generally hilarious An American Pickle (debuting on HBO Max), starts out like a silly comedy about a Rip van Rogen who wakes up in 2019 Brooklyn after being preserved in pickle brine for 100 years. But it’s really about preserving Jewish heritage and respecting ancestors, especially those who are dead. An aggressively secular Jew, Rogen is starring in a startlingly forthright tale of Jewish pride. The movie is at first funny in a way that’s like a cross between Fiddler on the Roof and The Jerk, then more cuttingly political, and finally, in its third act, a bit sappy and beholden to a stale Hollywood formula from a generation ago, when high-concept, feel-good movies like this rang up big numbers at the box office. (This one was originally planned as a theatrical release.)

Rogen plays Herschel Greenbaum, a beleaguered ditch-digger in a Cossack-terrorized Eastern Europe who comes to Brooklyn, where the only job he can get is on the floor of a pickle factory in 1919. He falls in a vat of pickle brine and is perfectly preserved for 100 years, when he is discovered and guided to his only surviving relative, his great-grandson Ben Greenbaum, a hipster Brooklyn app developer who — what a coincidence! — is the same age Herschel was when he got pickled. That way Rogen gets to play both parts.

Herschel, whom Rogen plays with a thick shtetl accent and a bushy beard that is as common in today’s Williamsburg as it was in the Pale of Settlement, is politically incorrect, physically violent with those who dishonor his people, and outrageously reactionary. He’s hilarious and lovable and he completely dominates the picture, with Ben reduced to playing his flustered straight man. Picture a Jewish Archie Bunker, or a 135-year-old Ron Swanson, who keeps administering one rhetorical noogie after another to Ben, the kombucha-drinking Brooklyn normcore techie dipwad who says things like, “Let’s go to Smorgasburg, they have jackfruit nachos.” Ben invites Herschel to move in with him, thinking he’s going to introduce the old man to cool modern stuff. Instead, Herschel immediately adjusts to his surroundings and schools Ben about the importance of ancient values such as honor, family, faith, and loyalty.

Herschel’s rise in 21st-century New York City is like a checklist of conservative values (well, a Jewish version of that, anyway: He thinks Christianity is a fraud). Because he wants to earn money to create more respectful surroundings for the graveyard where his beloved wife is buried, he becomes a great American entrepreneur, the top artisanal pickle man in all of Williamsburg, impeded only by the usual conservative bugbear, a government employee with a clipboard. Then he becomes a conservative icon, mainly because he’s willing to insult everybody. Which sounds about right.

Food bloggers love that Herschel uses kooky unmatched jars and only three ingredients (cucumbers, salt and rainwater). He becomes an Internet star, the sickest of picklers. He’s trending! He inspires listicles! (“Top Ten Signs that Herschel Is Literally a Superhero.”) By accident, he becomes a political hero in an update of Being There, and his tax policy is one we can all get behind: “You tax Herschel, Herschel will do violence to you. Terrible violence!” Admirers say things like, “He’s playing chess, everybody else is playing checkers,” suggesting a parallel with Donald Trump that is surprisingly generous. The more outrageous Herschel gets, the more people love him, and Kanye West is a fan. This movie is a bracing 90-minute respite to the Summer of Woke, and a riotous reminder that politically incorrect humor can still thrive amid cancel culture, even as Herschel himself looks like he might get canceled.

Rogen, the screenwriter Simon Rich, and the director Brandon Trost (whose first major feature this is) handle every beat beautifully until the movie hits a narrative dead end in the last half-hour and is forced to recalibrate. The final act is lovingly grounded in Jewish tradition, but it’s also formulaically sweet, and reaches for the heart at the expense of laughs. Given all that came before it, I would have preferred something tart, even briny.