A small town Michigan couple games the lottery and winds up raking in millions in "Jerry & Marge Go Large," an inspired-by-a-true-story comedy that squanders its goodwill by suffocating everything it touches in folksy cliches.
Bryan Cranston and Annette Bening play Jerry and Marge Selbee, a retired couple in Evart, 30 miles south of Cadillac and home to about 1,900 people. Math whiz Jerry retires from Kellogg's and doesn't know what to do with himself. When he spots a lottery game with a loophole he can exploit to his financial advantage, he and Marge go all in, and director David Frankel ("The Devil Wears Prada," "Marley & Me") exhausts himself attempting to turn their story into a living Norman Rockwell painting.
Jerry starts small, betting $2,000 and not breaking even, and keeping his losses to himself. He is extremely financially conservative, but he knows a winner when he spots one. The next time out he bets $16,000 and wins $21,000, and soon he's bringing his wife and several friends in town in on the action. Everyone wins.
When the Michigan state lotto shuts down the game, Jerry and Marge begin traveling to Massachusetts where they're running a similar game with the same odds. Thousands turn into millions, and soon a Boston Globe reporter is hot on the story and wants to know who this Michigan couple is that keeps breaking the bank.
The details are mostly true to the Selbees' story, but the script by Brad Copeland ("Wild Hogs," "Spies in Disguise") goes wonky when it introduces Tyler (Uly Schlesinger), a sniveling Harvard kid with a "Matrix" poster on his wall who has also cracked the code on the game.
Every movie needs a villain, and so Tyler threatens to hack Jerry and Marge's financial accounts if they don't back off and let him keep all the winnings to him and his group. The movie stops just short of giving him a mustache to twist as he laughs maniacally into the night while stroking his hairless pet cat, but it does give Jerry the opportunity to browbeat Tyler and teach him a good old fashioned lesson in humility and small town ethics.
In real life, there was a syndicate of MIT students who were also profiting from the game; there are no indications of villainy between the two groups, but hey, that's Hollywood. "Jerry & Marge Go Large" takes a charming story — the Selbees, all told, ended up winning around $27 million over a nine-year period — and turns it into a mediocre, plodding movie. In the world of gambling, that's called blowing a winning ticket.
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'JERRY & MARGE GO LARGE'
Grade: C
MPAA rating: PG-13 (for some language and suggestive references)
Running time: 1:37
How to watch: On Paramount+ Friday
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