As cute and understuffed as the plushies alluded to by its title, Kristin Gore and Damian Kulash, Jr.’s “The Beanie Bubble” is a dramatic comedy born from the collision between two different fads: The Beanie Baby mania of the late ’90s, and the corporate biopic craze of the early 2020s.
Like “Air,” “Barbie,” “Blackberry,” and “Tetris” before it (remember when they made a movie about the thrilling race to patent “Tetris?”), this Apple TV+ original uses a footnote in the recent history of North American capitalism as the backdrop for a character-driven saga about the nature of success. And like several of those aforementioned stories of riches gained and/or lost, “The Beanie Bubble” ultimately says more about the state of the film business than it does any other. It says that we used to tell stories about people, but now we’d rather tell stories about products — even products that have lost virtually all of their former value. It says that brand recognition used to be a metric for success, but now it’s a prerequisite for making anything in the first place.
Most of all, it says that even Hollywood might be uncomfortable with selling out to that degree, as “The Beanie Bubble” is stitched together with a level of cognitive dissonance that exposes all of its seams. A broadly entertaining piece of content that would feel like a knockoff if not for the obvious quality of its cast, the #GirlBoss empowerment tale that Gore and Kulash have spun from the 20th century’s cuddliest asset bubble might insist that real success means walking away from our billion-dollar fairy tales, but that proves to be a tough pill to swallow when administered by a movie that suggests we’re more invested in them than ever.
Which isn’t to say that Gore and Kulash didn’t put their own spin on the rise and fall of Ty Inc. Based on Zac Bissonnette’s “The Great Beanie Baby Bubble: Mass Delusion and the Dark Side of Cute,” their movie opens with a title card that sets the humor-ish tone for the story to come: “There are parts of the truth that you can’t make up. The rest, we did.” Here’s the kind of truth that you can’t make up: “The Beanie Bubble” was co-directed by the daughter of former Vice President Al Gore, and her husband, the lead singer of the rock band OK Go. And why not! Neither of them had made a feature before, but both of them share a passing familiarity with once-ubiquitous things that America has left behind, and — on a less backhanded note — both share an industriousness that well serves this tale of unexpected second acts.
That’s just one of several ways in which “The Beanie Bubble” makes good on its preface, as the film that follows those introductory words isn’t shy about using a scaffolding of basic facts to support its semi-invented story. It’s a story that cuts corners, consolidates characters, and happily airbrushes its corporate history into the most pleasant streaming experience possible.
Pleasant for its target audience, at least. Anyone expecting this R-rated movie to be as kid-friendly as the stuffies that inspired it is in for a rude awakening (when lighting designer Sheila Harper chews out toy mogul Ty Warner at the end of their agitated meet-cute, the latter responds with a devilish “Can I come?”), but the same is true for anyone holding their breath for a hard-nosed docudrama. Forget handheld cameras, fly-on-the-wall zooms, and speeches lifted directly from deposition transcripts, the vibe here is more “Working Girl” meets “I, Tonya.” It’s Zach Galifianakis slurping chocolate milk out of a carton in every scene, wearing a hairpiece that resembles an embalmed vulture, and wooing Sarah Snook with a choreographed rollerblade dance set to Ready for the World’s 1985 single ‘Oh Sheila’” (the rare scene that recalls the visual panache Kulash once brought to his band’s music videos).
The biggest change that Gore’s script makes to this story as it was told in Bissonnette’s book has to do with its timeline, as “The Beanie Bubble” adopts a non-linear approach that bounces back and forth between the ’80s and ’90s in order to illustrate the cyclicality at its core; times may change, and yesterday’s tulip fever might be tomorrow’s NFTs, but people basically always stay the same. Look no further than charismatic narcissist Ty Warner (Galifianakis), a middle-aged man who’s been a child all his life. The three women at the heart of “The Beanie Bubble” all meet the future billionaire at different times in his journey from rags to riches, but they’re all essentially dealing with the same person, and none have the perspective to see that.
Robbie Jones (Elizabeth Banks, strutting through a performance that doesn’t require her to stretch) is the first one to meet Ty, as the two find themselves living in the same drab Chicago apartment complex at the height of Reaganomics. He’s in shock over the death of his abusive father, and she’s itching to get away from her disabled husband — a detail this movie notes for its selfishness, only to conveniently scrub from the record when Robbie is recast as an avenging business angel later on. The two spark a romance fueled by pipe dreams, desperation, and Warner’s enthusiasm over selling stuffed Himalayan cats.
We can only assume that things must have soured at some point along the way because Warner is single and extremely ready to mingle during the Sheila Harper parts of this story. Set at the start of the Clinton era and backstopped by the iron-clad vulnerability of Snook’s performance in the role of a single mother who swore that she wouldn’t let another man walk out on her daughters, these scenes chronicle Warner’s evolution from suspiciously sweet CEO to passively monstrous mega-mogul.
It’s a transition that Gore’s script charts with a greater focus on emotional neediness than sales figures, as the Wonka-like Warner steals his best ideas from his new girlfriend’s kids (e.g., a stuffed animal small enough to fit inside a child’s backpack), and rewards them with an exaggerated degree of the paternal warmth they’ve been missing in return. It’s hardly a spoiler to reveal that he’ll fuck that entire family over at some point down the line.
Maya (the always great Geraldine Viswanathan) might be the only person who doesn’t see it coming. She’s certainly smart enough to see everything else. The first or second-generation immigrant comes to Ty Inc. as a college intern, only to prove herself invaluable to the company when she harnesses the nascent power of the internet to reach Beanie Baby collectors where they live and capitalize on the toys’ exponential resale value. Alas, it turns out you can put a price on invaluable work, and Maya is paid a mere $17 an hour to make her boss into a billionaire. While the film’s sugary tone and black-and-white gender dynamics can make it feel as off-trend as the toys it’s about — brace for dialogue like “we don’t bail, we lean in” — at the end of the day there’s just nothing more timeless than exploited labor (is it too late for Ty Inc. to unionize?).
Rather than three parallel stories that overlap in a handful of marginally effective moments over the course of the movie, “The Beanie Bubble” is really just one story told in three ways (each identified by slightly different color schemes and many intrusive time stamps). It’s a story about a broken man paying his pain forward and making a fortune along the way; a story about why a man who doesn’t know how to accept love should never be trusted to share profits.
It is, by nature, one of the most familiar of all American stories, and one whose rote telling is largely redeemed here because Galifianakis makes Warner so hard to pin down. He’s an overgrown little boy with severe impulse control, but also a seemingly warm-hearted leader with a willingness to accept (or nick) a good idea from anyone on the team. He’s a hair-splitting perfectionist who constantly recalls product lines that go to market with even the smallest errors, and yet he styles himself as if he’s permanently cosplaying as some kind of Forbes-approved Mr. Magorium. He’s a narcissistic ego monster of the worst sort, and yet his callousness is underwritten by a profound need to be cared for.
Galifianakis plays all of these things at once, his performance raising a flurry of red flags that entice people to run toward him even when it seems obvious he’s going to step aside at the last second. In his hands, Warner becomes a person far more interesting than the product for which he’s known, but “The Beanie Bubble” — too corporate to be funny, too fuzzy to be cruel — refuses to let this be his story (as you might gather from the introductory voiceover telling us “This is not his story”). Despite building their adaptation around the cyclical predictability of American capitalism, Gore and Kulash can’t help but twist history’s biggest toy craze into a hollow and half-invented corporate fantasy about three women who bought low, sold high, and reinvested all the profits in themselves. If only it were that easy.
Grade: C
Apple Studios will release “The Beanie Bubble” in theaters on Friday, July 21. It will be available to stream on Apple TV+ starting Friday, July 28.
