Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Jerry and Marge Go Large’ on Paramount+, a Marginally Heartwarming Collection of Colloquialisms Starring Bryan Cranston and Annette Bening

Paramount+ exclusive Jerry and Marge Go Large deposits heavy-hitters Bryan Cranston and Annette Bening in a squooshy-soft BOATS (Based On A True Story, bro) movie, playing smalltown Michigan retirees who figured out how to game the lottery system to their advantage. A 2018 HuffPo piece detailed how a puzzle-solving math whiz and his wife netted $27 million, which is exactly the type of story that could be spun into a movie about a couple who used that dough to revitalize their struggling town, and about a math-brained fella who finally learns how to better relate to other human beings.

JERRY AND MARGE GO LARGE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Jerry (Cranston) has worked at the cereal-flakes factory for 42 years. He’s a line manager, but the line he manages is being shut down, so his options are retirement, or, well, retirement. He’d rather not, but that’s the way the cereal flakes crumble. Marge (Bening) is thrilled to finally have plenty of quality time to spend with her husband, but the air of melancholy around him means there’s not much sugar sprinkled atop this bowl of cereal flakes. He putters and mutters through his discontentment. The fishing boat his son Ben (Jake McDorman) and daughter Dawn (Anna Camp) pitched in to buy him for a retirement gift just isn’t the milk he needs to adequately soften his cereal flakes, and I promise I’ll put the kibosh on that metaphor from here on out, but I also need to mention that a mishap with the boat finds Gerry kicking the boat in a matter that’s almost as comic as when an agitated Walter White chucked a pizza on the roof.

Jerry has always been an absolute maniac when it comes to numbers. He can calculate shit on a napkin like very few can. One day he picks up a lottery brochure and discovers a loophole in the WinFall game, so, without telling Marge, he withdraws a couple grand, buys a couple thousand tickets and makes a tidy profit. Next time, he spends more and wins more, $15,700, which he hides in a box of sugar-coated wheat-biscuit cereal. (This particular breakfast-food company gets a lot of product placement in this movie.) He isn’t the type to be sneaky, so he confesses his little endeavor to Marge, whose eyes light up. She wants to be part of this. They really need some excitement in their lives. Playing gin with the neighbors just ain’t cuttin’ it. And besides, they never ever ever take chances, and they haven’t had sex in a really long time. “Let’s be a little stupid,” she says. “We got married when we were 17, so we know how to do it.”

And so Jerry and Marge take the WinFall winnings and buy more lottery tickets – the larger the investment, the larger the return. Michigan shutters the WinFall game, but it’s still active in Massachusetts, so they pack up their coupons and frozen casseroles for cross-country trips in their good ol’ pickup truck, rekindling their relationship along the way. Meanwhile, their little town of Evart, Michigan is struggling. The local accountant doesn’t have enough clients, so he’s part-timing as an online travel agent. The ice cream shop is boarded up. The pavilion where they used to have Jazz Fest is dilapidated. Jerry and Marge form a partnership with friends and townsfolk, allowing them to invest even more into their lottery scheme – which is totally legal, mind you – so they can help make Evart the vibrant community it used to be; they even rope in the goofball convenience store manager (Rainn Wilson) who they befriend, since he helps them print out thousands of tickets.

Also meanwhile, a journalist tasked with writing lottery stories for pageviews (a 100 percent legitimate, and possibly quite sad occurrence that I witnessed firsthand while working at a newspaper) spots interesting anomalies in the WinFall results. And extra meanwhile, a snotty pissant of a Harvard student, Tyler (Uly Schlesinger) also decodes the WinFall loophole, thus manufacturing some drama in the movie, which can’t just be happy-happy-joy-joy all the time – you gotta have some stakes lest this is all just a bowl of dry multicolored fruit-flavored hoops, right?

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: That episode of Seinfeld with the bottle-deposit scheme crossed with the goofy colloquial accents and language of Fargo and the rhyming title (and goofy colloquial accents and language, even though it’s totally fictional) of Barb and Star go to Vista del Mar.

Performance Worth Watching: You can’t help but cringe a little, watching Cranston and Bening lean into the gee-whiz fuddy-duddy idiomatic characterizations of down-home Michiganders, which are about 30 percent accurate, 70 percent caricature perceptions of what people on the coasts think Midwesterners are like.

Memorable Dialogue: The state of Jerry and Marge’s marriage:

Marge: I’ve waited 40 years for it to be just us, and so far, we kind of suck at it.

Jerry: We have Jeopardy.

Sex and Skin: Jerry and Marge make out and fall into a bed that’s out of frame. So, none.

Our Take: Of course our two beloved principals go big and broad, because that’s what they’re asked to do, Jerry and Marge being a movie calculated to generate feel-goody-goody warm mush – it’s more microwaved oatmeal than stays-crispy-even-in-milk bran-based breakfast optimal for colon health. Which isn’t to say it tastes bad; it’s just overly familiar, the same spread we’ve broken our fast with many times before.

There’s half-smile-worthy comedy to be had here, in the script’s occasionally amusing dialogue, Wilson’s eccentricities, Cranston’s fussy mannerisms and our inability to avoid Breaking Bad comparisons, especially when Jerry stacks up totes upon totes of lottery tickets in the garage (gotta be prepared for when the tax man calls!), which begins to resemble Walter White’s storage unit full of cash. Difference is, Jerry and Marge stirs in upbeat montages, inspirational speeches and enough syrupy schmaltz to make a totally different type of breakfast. Your tolerance for such things may vary, but as far as formulaic crowdpleasers go, it’s not indigestible.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Jerry and Marge Go Large is watchable, a nice, totally adequate, copacetic movie, enough to earn it an incredibly marginal recommendation.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.