An American Pickle (2020)

This is an exceptional work by Seth Rogen, the king of the stoner comedy genre. In his new film, made exclusively for HBO Max, Rogen plays two characters at once. One of the world’s leading comedians (who also became the film’s producer and shaped its concept) plays Herschel Greenbaum, a simple Jewish labourer, who together with his wife Sarah (Sarah Snook, the Succession star) is trying to earn enough money for their daily bread and two burial plots — and that’s the limit of their ambitions. One day Herschel falls into a vat of pickle brine and time-travels to our times when someone inadvertently opens the lid. It turns out he has a great-grandson Ben, who is unsuccessfully trying to launch a startup. Herschel decides to begin a partisan campaign making those same pickles, but this time organic to increase the sales. This entire absurd collision makes the heroes realize that the Jewish family values are timeless, and a hundred-year age gap is not an obstacle to understanding one another.