Pupule rating: 3.3
Netflix
Seth Rogen plays two roles in this unique story. One is the grandpa from the old country who gets brined in a vat of pickle juice for 100 years and comes back to life in today's world. The other is the grandson, a tech inventor who can't see to quite pull the trigger on his lifelong project.
Rogen and his crew give us plenty of chances to like, then dislike grandpa as he copes with early 1900s political incorrectness in a PC world of 2020. It's the head-butting, the arguments, the sincerely opposite attitudes of the two men that keep the story percolating. A poor immigrant who worked himself from rags to riches, and a second-generation underachiever who nonetheless is a tireless working man.
American Pickle is also a statement about the fickle nature of a world transformed by social media, for better or (mostly) worse. Rogen gets his point across, and he is superb in a dual role. I wonder, though, if this would have been as good or better with another actor in the role of the grandson.
Rogen as grandpa, though, steals the show. Always thinking, always game-planning — a nicer way of saying scheming. Rogen plays him as a pioneer, a man a century behind his time, but creative and persistent enough to make a pickle vat splash literally in the street. Even with his sexist mentality, grandpa is all immigrants to a large degree. And Rogen's nuanced approach, mixing the thinker with the bossy, loud entrepreneur, is compelling to the end.
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