Jerry & Marge Go Large
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Winning the lottery is a desire for most people, imagining new cars, homes, travel and everything that fantasy allows to dream. What if, instead, the desire was to improve the life of the neighborhood. This is the theme of the film “Jerry & Marge Go Large” (USA, 2022), based on the true story of a retired couple who won millions of dollars from the state lottery.
Jerry Selbee (Bryan Cranston) had arrived at a stage of life that is a dream for many people and a nightmare for him, retirement. After spending more than forty years managing a production line in a factory, he was forced to retire due to its decommissioning.
Jerry was an affable man, but with difficulties in relating because his mind was always absorbed by numbers. While he had great skill for mathematical and statistical calculations, he was terrified of altering his routine. His wife, Marge (Annete Bening) was the only one who understood and knew how to deal with her husband’s personality.
One day, reading a state lottery advertising brochure, he realized a flaw that would allow him to make many hits. When there was the accumulation of games without the main prize pool, the cake was divided by the approximate bets. Thinking purely of proving his theory, Jerry withdraws money from his savings and bets the lottery. When he receives the award, he is afraid that his woman will find out and hide the money in the pantry.
Obviously it doesn’t take long for Marge to find out something strange is going on. When he tells what happened, Marge gets excited and decides to help him with the enterprise. In fact, she had realized that this was a challenge for Jerry and she wanted him to stay involved and busy.
When money starts flowing, they need to reveal what is happening to their accountant, who also wants to participate. At the same time, Jerry and Marge observe their increasingly decadent city, and decide to invite friends and neighbors to be part of the group.
Each round they invest more, and also earn more. This begins to bring some difficulties as they need to move to another state to bet. A competitor’s entry into the game happens when a Harvard student, Tyler (Uly Schlesinger), finds out what’s going on.
Unlike Jerry, who does things up right all the time, Tyler uses illicit expedients, like hacking accounts, uses his colleagues to fill out the slips, borrows money from his father’s friends, etc. And obviously all the profit is for him.
The two’s earnings draw the attention of a reporter, who does a story on the case, showing not only the failure of the system, but also that no one cared to correct this, since it was a lot of money circulating in the system.
The matter ends up triggering the change of the system, and is the end of Jerry and Marge’s enterprise. Even so, he and his group of friends earned over $27 million accumulated.
This story could yield an interesting documentary, but the movie format allowed emotional involvement, a bit of suspense and comedy, and the inevitable sympathy and complicity of the viewer with the protagonists. This was made possible thanks to the direction by David Frankel and wonderful performance of Annete Bening and Bryan Cranstron.
Annete Bening has a long film career, initially going through roles where her seductive beauty was striking, but evolved wonderfully, knowing how to grow old on and off screen.
Bryan Cranstron has a long career in television, going through “Seinfeld” and “Malcolm”, but specially in the role of Walter White, the protagonist of the series “Breaking Bad”. Cranstron manages to play Jerry Selbe by presenting his tics and manias without making the character cartoonish.
“Jerry and Marge Go Large” is a fun movie, with a dynamic edition, engaging soundtrack and adorable characters. It’s hard to believe that everything really happened. The couple who experienced this adventure participates in the film as executive producers.
This film can be watched on Paramount+, available on the Amazon Prime Video streaming service.