Heavy-handed satire and schmaltz: American Pickle reviewed

American Pickle is a comedy based on a short story by Simon Rich, originally published in the New Yorker, and I was sold on the synopsis alone: ‘An eastern European Jew falls into a vat of pickles and is brined for 100 years before emerging in modern-day Brooklyn.’

It’ll be a fish-out-of-water film like Crocodile Dundee, I thought. But more Jewish. And it felt like I’d been waiting all my life for a film like Crocodile Dundee, but more Jewish. In fact, where have the more Jewish versions of Crocodile Dundee been until now?

You think: an entire factory left un-redeveloped for 100 years? It’s prime real estate, isn’t it?

But. While there are a few decent jokes the conceit can’t, alas, sustain the running time and eventually it all falls away into heavy-handed satire and then workaday schmaltz. That is schmaltz of the sentimental kind rather than the schmaltz that is rendered chicken fat which my own grandmother used to serve (on bread, like dripping) and which you would never call workaday.