One of our most underrated comic actors shines in this surprisingly thoughtful and moving character comedy.
Of all the miracles of modern life, I am often most impressed by the supermarket. The conventional grocery store is a single building, accessible to (generally speaking) the rich and the poor, filled with countless varieties of essential items (milk, eggs, bread, etc.) and alleged delicacies in freshly-made or frozen food for the taking at relatively reasonable prices, would have been mind-blowing to anyone born in a less advantageous time (or, admittedly, born in a less economically privileged station in the present tense). We have long treated it as a societal given. Labor issues and moral compromises notwithstanding, food that would have been a rare thing to generations past is now available at the push of a button or via five minutes in a microwave.
Another film that was intended to be in theaters before the pandemic closed those theaters and studios began triaging, Sony sold American Pickle to Warner Media and now, as of Thursday, it’ll be HBO Max’s first original feature film. Directed by longtime cinematographer Brandon Trost and penned by Simon Rich, this adaptation of Rich’s novella Sell Out is a distinctly small-scale character comedy that dives headfirst into the inherent tragedy of its story. Considering the media reaction to Rogen’s criticism of Israel’s governmental policies (fun fact: criticizing Israel is not automatically anti-Semitic), it’s ironic/fitting that American Pickle is as unapologetically Jewish a mainstream feature as I’ve seen since Zack Braff’s surprisingly terrific Wish I Was Here, which the actor famously financed through Kickstarter in 2014.
