As much as I enjoyed the whimsical, girl-power, suitably satirical nature of the Apple TV+ original feature “The Beanie Bubble,” it’s too bad the movie makes you work so hard to enjoy what should have been a straightforward, comfort-viewing experience.
Allow me to get my local bias out of the way first and note it would have been lovely if the unlikely story of the eccentric entrepreneur Ty Warner and the explosion of the Beanie Babies phenomenon had actually been filmed in the Chicago area, given this is where the story originated. Alas, this is another Atlanta-fills-in-for-Chicago project, and it’s arguably the least convincing onscreen imitation of our city since Toronto tried to be Chicago and the burbs in “My Spy” in 2020.
More troublesome is the decision by writer Kristin Gore (who co-directed with Damian Kulash, Jr.) to bounce back and forth and back and forth and BACK AND FORTH along the timeline, shifting the focus among three different points of view and creating a needlessly jumbled and sometimes exasperatingly convoluted story. It might have been so much cleaner to just take us from the nascent days of the Beanie Babies through the years when the plush toys were insanely popular and in some cases worth a small fortune, to the inevitable moment when there was a glut in the market and kids (and their parents) looked elsewhere for the next craze, e.g., Furby and Pokemon et al. We’ll never know.
(Fun facts! Gore is the daughter of former vice president Al Gore, and she is married to her co-director, the lead singer of the rock band known as OK Go, which was founded in Chicago. OK let’s go from here.)
Those caveats aside, “The Beanie Bubble” is a frequently funny and breezy reminder of the pure insanity of the craze surrounding plush toys with names such as Patti the Platypus and Peanut the Elephant and Iggy Iguana, with an nearly unrecognizable Zach Galifianakis capturing Warner’s childlike curiosity, admirable drive and disturbingly narcissistic and sometimes emotionally bruising persona.
Elizabeth Banks, Sarah Snook and Geraldine Viswanathan all kill it as women who played integral roles in the monumental growth of the company and were royally screwed over by Warner but ultimately found their own paths to success and happiness by walking away from the great manipulator. (The fictionalized comedy/drama film is based on the book “The Great Beanie Baby Bubble: Mass Delusion and the Dark Side of Cute” by Zac Bissonnette. An opening title card notes, “There are parts of the truth you just can’t make up. The rest, we did.”)
“The Beanie Bubble” juggles the story via those multiple timelines and the viewpoints of three women:
- Robbie (Elizabeth Banks), a go-getter who met Warner when they were living in the same drab apartment complex in Chicago in the 1980s and partnered with him on his first forays into making and selling plush toys and helped him grow the business for years.
- Maya (Geraldine Viswanathan), who joined the company as a teenage intern and — at least in this telling of the story — came up with the idea of making Beanie Babies “limited edition” toys, thus driving up their value instantly, and introduced Warner to the world of the internet, where Beanie Babies were bought and sold at ridiculously inflated prices.
- Sheila (Sarah Snook), a single mother of two young girls who becomes Ty’s live-in girlfriend as her daughters come up with some great ideas that Ty implements, e.g., stuffed animals small enough to fit in kids’ backpacks and accompany them to school.
With period-piece needle drops and some admirably accurate hairstyles and costumes reflecting the various time periods in the 1980s and 1990s, “The Beanie Bubble” chronicles the growth of Beanie. Babies (and thus Ty Inc.), with Warner fronting the company as a self-styled modern-day Mr. Magorium who steadfastly refused to do business with the toy company giants and yet leapt at the chance to partner with McDonald’s.
With first Robbie and then Maya and eventually Sheila becoming increasingly exasperated with Warner’s volatile personality and duplicitous maneuverings and acts of betrayal, Galifianakis does a remarkable job of showing at least a slice of humanity and vulnerability still lurking inside an increasingly dislikable megalomaniac who claims all credit for the miraculous success of the plush toys, even as the real heroes of the story — Robbie, Maya and Sheila — tell us otherwise.
Banks is superb in a role that’s squarely in her comfort zone, Snook slips into a Midwest accent and expertly plays a sweet and family-first mother who is a million miles away from her Shiv on “Succession,” and Geraldine Viswanathan (“Blockers,” “Bad Education”) continues her ascent to stardom with a slyly effective performance.
This is the year of the Corporate Biopic, from “Air” to “Tetris” to “BlackBerry” to “Flamin’ Hot,” with “Barbie” as an outlier in a category of her own. “The Beanie Bubble” doesn’t reach the heights of “Air” or “BlackBerry,” two of the best films of 2023, but it’s an entertaining reminder of a time when millions were caught up in a frenzy over a batch of colorful and understuffed plush toys.
