Jerry (Bryan Cranston) and Marge (Annette Bening) have entered retirement, yet for Jerry, he cannot seem to settle down and adjust to having all of this free time.  While at a diner after a boating accident, he discovers a loophole in the payout of a lottery game.  Sure of his math, he places a large wager, and as predicted, he hits.  Jerry wagers more and more on the game, eventually forming an LLC with the locals in town to bring in even bigger pulls and put the money towards bettering the community.  But Jerry is not the only one privy to this loophole, and soon other players and the lottery commission begin to threaten the scheme. 

Directed by David Frankel and written by Brad Copeland, Jerry & Marge Go Large is a feel-good family film that follows the unlikely true story of Jerry and Marge Selbee who won big and never broke any rules.  Released on Paramount+, the film did not come with much fanfare, despite Cranston and Bening being featured in affable leading roles.  At only 96 minutes, Jerry & Marge is easy to watch and an enjoyable film that scratches the itch for pure, good-hearted, entertainment.  It is not out to unlock any great mysteries of life, it seeks only to provide a simple pleasure of a story about a man who wants to use his talents to help his neighbors. 

Cranston brings warmth to the role as the affable retiree.  The role does not appear to be much of a challenge for the veteran actor, but he embraces the film and the role with the same care and attention he has shown in his more prestigious roles.  His chemistry with Bening is a little rough at first, but much of that can be attributed to Marge’s small involvement in the opening act.  It is nice to see her role grow as the film progresses, but it still leaves us wanting more.  Thankfully, she is not totally regulated to the back seat of the narrative, but even when her involvement with the LLC grows, Bening’s role does not get much deeper than being an extra set of hands to help Jerry print and count tickets. 

Films like these are often made and broken on how they handle the supporting roles, and in Jerry & Marge, there is a standout in Bill (Rainn Wilson) who runs the convenience store where the tickets are printed.  He is a total goofball character whose humor leans on the absurdity, but Wilson commits and makes it work. He also has the benefit of being in the film in a large enough role that despite playing a firmly established bit as an oddball with few true aspirations, his character feels fully formed even if he is there primarily to just bring in the laughs.  In contrast, Steve (Larry Wilmore), the accountant-turned-travel agent, while putting in an enjoyable performance with a few cute laughs, by and large, is stuck recycling the same joke over and over. Jerry and Marge, then, tend to drive the narrative and are the straight shooters that exist in the goofy world of the film, but they do match the good-hearted nature of the supporting cast and no one is ever left being the butt end of the joke.    

There is, however, a weak point in the narrative in the form of Tyler (Uly Schlesinger), an Ivy league deadbeat who also tunes in to the same loophole Jerry is using and then also figures out that he is not the only one using the rules of the game to their advantage.  The shoehorned antagonist, to no real discredit to his performance, is incredibly one note and really derails the overall tone of the film. His character is little more than a sniveling brat, and while it is nice that the film does not use this as a jumping-off point to lambast today’s youth, a little more development in his character would have been helpful here for the overall quality of the film. It almost feels like the film wants to engage in a discussion about the philosophy of money in how Jerry uses the winning to enrich the neighborhood and allow it to thrive, whereas Tyler wants to hoard it just because he can, but it quickly shies away from that after a very brief encounter between the two. 

Overall, Jerry & Marge Go Large is a charming story, but as a feature film, it is lacking some depth. Some of this could be given the nature of the facts as it very much feels like a profile article from a magazine’s human-interest section which makes sense given the source material for the film is ascribed to Jason Fagone who initially broke the story in 2018 to the Huffington Post. Watching people win big at gambling and taking down the house is always exciting, but typically these stories take place in a casino where there are other characters, and a certain level of skill is needed in addition to luck of the draw to outwit and outplay those at the table. Here, there is none of that narrative drive as the numbers do not lie – once Jerry wins once, we know he will win every time after that as the equation is constant. There are a few roadblocks that come up along the way, but they are easily overcome and the tension just is not there in a lottery as with other forms of chance. It is the epitome of easy viewing, though, and can find itself at home on small screens across the country thanks to the accessibility provided by streaming, reaching an audience that it would otherwise struggle to meet given a more traditional platformed release.