Delayed Reaction: Jerry & Marge Go Large

Premise: A couple find a loophole in the lottery and use it to make millions and revitalize their small town.

 

Jerry Selbee was a bored retiree who noticed a mathematic flaw in a lottery game that gave him an edge if he played often enough. So, he made a company, got a bunch of friends to invest, then spent entire days printing and reviewing lottery tickets every few weeks to build a small fortune. Eventually, other people caught on and the game went away. It’s a pretty boring story when you really think about it. It’s like when you actually understand how card counting works. It’s a lot of math to get a marginal edge that with a large enough sample size, returns a profit. Still, I understand how someone hears “a small-town couple found a way to beat the lottery” and thinks there’s a movie there. I immediately imagine some coordinated scheme, shady dealings, and threat of prison. It turns out, it’s all legal and very dull. Like, cutting coupons on a massive scale.

 

That’s the fundamental problem that Jerry and Marge Go Large the movie never solves. As a HuffPost article, it’s pretty good. An article can get into all the technicalities over a few pages, peppering in side-stories for flavor, then be over. It’s not a particularly cinematic story. They try to find a way to liven it up though. They cast the massively overqualified Bryan Cranston and Annette Bening in the lead roles. The supporting cast is filled with reflexively funny people like Rainn Wilson, Larry Wilmore, and Michael McKean. They put these small city folks against some entitled Harvard kids. There’s a Boston Globe reporter slowly catching on too. It’s all so clean though. As I said, nothing about this is illegal. Well, nothing about what Jerry is doing is illegal. The Harvard kids break the law, because they’re the villains. The Massachusetts lottery is being shady but not breaking the law from what I understand. Jerry and Marge are just nice people spreading the wealth so their friends can get rich and their town can throw a Jazz Festival, featuring – checks notes – Tori Kelly.

 

This is a nice movie. It’s very pleasant. It feels a tad patronizing to small town people but never enough to turn me off. It’s tough to make any movie where the real enemy is math and sample size compelling. I didn’t like the movie however I couldn’t find any reason to hate it.

 

Side Rant: They really should’ve made this more clearly a period piece. In the early 2000s, when this actually happened, I fully believe 1) that the lottery could make this kind of mathematical mistake, 2) that some bored retiree would notice it first, and 3) that only one group of Harvard kids would notice the loophole after that. That period wasn’t that far removed from the McDonald’s Monopoly game being rigged and unnoticed for over a decade. In the 2020s, the age of crypto and data mining, there is no way dozens of people aren’t tracking exactly this kind of mathematic mistake with the lottery. We’re all too online for it to happen. Or maybe I’m naïve.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don’t Recommend