Bryan Cranston almost does a Walter White again

In the entertaining American comedy-drama Jerry and Marge Go Large the Breaking Bad actor finds a similar – though not illegal – outlet for his particular talent.

Annette Bening and Bryan Cranston in Jerry and Marge Go Large

Jerry and Marge Go Large (PG)
Paramount+
★★★½

We know Bryan Cranston as Walter White – high school chemistry teacher turned drug manufacturer – in the television series Breaking Bad.

In the entertaining American comedy-drama Jerry and Marge Go Large he finds a similar – though not illegal – outlet for his particular talent.

Jerry Selbee (Cranston) has a gift for numbers. When he is forced into retirement after 42 years as a line manager at Kellogg’s, he does the sums on a lottery game, Winfall, and finds a loophole that guarantees he will win.

He keeps this quiet and bets small. When his wife of 47 years, Marge (a wonderful Annette Bening), finds out she tells him they should go large.

“I have waited 40 years for us to be just us and so far we suck at it,’’ she tells her newly retired husband. “Let’s be a little stupid. We got married when we were 17, so we know how to do it.”

Cranston and Bening are perfect together. Watching them it feels like they have been in love for almost half a century.

Marge revels in the excitement of their new life. As she and Jerry head off in their truck to put on their bets, Bruce Springsteen’s Glory Days blasts from the radio.

It takes days to place the bets. Jerry’s method – essentially buying so many tickets that the odds shift in his favour – is not dissimilar to the one MONA founder David Walsh used to kick start his fortune.

And, like Walsh’s experience, this is a true story. A 2018 HuffPost article by journalist Jason Fagone is the basis of this 96-minute movie ­directed by David Frankel (The Devil Wears Prada) and scripted by Brad Copeland (the TV series Arrested Development). The real Selbees are executive producers.

Jerry and Marge do not play the lottery only for themselves. They bring everyone in their small town in Michigan into the game and use the winnings to rebuild the place.

The take-it-all baddie role falls to a Harvard University student Tyler Langford (Uly Schlesinger) who also finds the loophole. The stand-off between Tyler and Jerry is worth waiting for. Cranston almost channels Breaking Bad.

Cranston and Bening are a pleasure to watch and the supporting actors have their scene-stealing moments, especially Rainn Wilson (Dwight Schrute in the US version of The Office) as a general store owner who joins the game.

There is a nice emotional undercurrent as Jerry comes to understand that while mathematics is easy, human beings are complex. This is a highly enjoyable, finely acted, big-hearted film that reminds us that people are not just numbers.

-

Thirteen Lives (PG)
Amazon Prime from August 5
★★★½

How do you tell a story when everyone already knows the ending?

You can decide to change it, as Quentin Tarantino does with the Manson cult and Sharon Tate in Once Upon a Time … In Hollywood, or you can stick with it and draw people in by other means.

American director Ron Howard understandably takes the second approach in Thirteen Lives, a survival drama based on the Tham Luang cave rescue mission in northern Thailand in 2018.

What happened over 18 days in July that year, as monsoonal rain fell and fell, is truly extraordinary and Howard takes us to places the TV news and Twitter could not.

We scuba through the claustrophobic water-filled cave; we crouch on a rock shelf with the 12 boys from a football club, aged 11-16, and their 25-year-old coach, as food runs out and oxygen levels fall lethally low; we hear the international rescue divers speaking frankly about the likely outcome.

“Those boys are never coming out,’’ British diver Rick Stanton (Viggo Mortensen) tells his compatriot and diving colleague James Volanthen (Colin Farrell).

“Never. I am telling it like it is.”

He says this after the divers have found the boys, which brings me to a Third Way for filmmakers and foregone conclusions: count on most people not remembering all the details.

I am one of them. I either did not know or had forgotten that finding the boys was the very hard easy part of the rescue mission. Getting them out was the very hard hard part.

There is a haunting scene when the divers, having found the boys and taken proof of life videos, submerge into the flooded cave to head back to base camp, with promises they will return. The boys, who went into the cave after football practice and became trapped by sudden rain, turn off their torches to save the batteries and all is black. They are 4km from the cave mouth and nothing but water is below them.

When Stanton suggests a way to save the 13 – “We call Harry’’ – Volanthen replies that the idea is “brilliant or insane or both”.

When Harry, aka Australian anaesthetist and diver Richard Harris (Joel Edgerton) turns up, he adds that it’s also “unethical and illegal”.

Yet he agrees to do it. This is the bit I did not know or had forgotten and it is astonishing.

We, like the boys and the divers, are immersed in a war with water. It will make viewers want to fill their lungs with air, for which much credit goes to Thai cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom (Call Me By Your Name) and American production designer Molly Hughes, who worked with Howard on his previous film, Hillbilly Elegy.

This movie was shot mostly in Queensland, with additional filming in Thailand.

Dual Oscar-winning director Howard (A Beautiful Mind) teams up with British scriptwriter and Oscar nominee William Nicholson (Gladiator and the superb film adaptation of his own play, Shadowlands). This is the third movie about this incredible story, following director and co-writer Tom Waller’s drama The Cave (2019) and Elizabeth Chai and Jimmy Chin’s documentary The Rescue (2021).

While parts of this film have a documentary feel – such as graphics telling us how long the divers are underwater – Howard deftly uses the 18-day time frame to make a thriller.

Almost the final hour of this 142-minute movie is taken up by the final three days.

The other challenge he faced was how to tell this story without it focusing on white saviours. He devotes much time to the boys’ families, the local community, the Thai provincial governor and Navy SEALs and to volunteers from around the world.

And both Mortensen and Farrell are restrained as the lead divers. It is interesting to see them in such relatively quietly spoken roles, compared with, say, Eastern Promises and The Gentlemen respectively.

This is a moving film.

The title, Thirteen Lives, goes to the still-beating heart of it.

When the divers find the boys on the 10th day, the only one of the 13 who speaks English asks, “Can we go out now?”

Joel Edgerton (left) as Harry Harris and Thira "Aum" Chutikul (right) as Commander Kiet in Thirteen Lives