The Unsung Heroes Can Rock Too — ‘The Beanie Bubble’
Apple TV+’s latest product-themed comedy is another feature about capitalism stuffed with cuteness and charm.
There are only so many ways to tell a story about capitalism, but the products to choose from are aplenty. And since these mega-successful or temporarily popular items began infiltrating our lives a long time ago — and continue to do so today — it’s somewhat natural that they've also seeped into cinema recently. Just by looking at some of the titles that premiered this year (Tetris, BlackBerry, and now Barbie, even if its approach is rather unconventional), we can already tell Hollywood is developing a new obsession to exploit this phenomenon. Apple TV+'s flashy comedy, The Beanie Bubble, directed by Kristin Gore and Damian Kulash, is the latest attempt that takes a cute-silly approach to recount the story of America’s stuffed animal craze, which took place in the 80s and 90s.
Based on Zac Bissonnette's 2015 non-fiction book, The Great Beanie Baby Bubble: Mass Delusion and the Dark Side of Cute, the plot follows Ty Warner (Zach Galifianakis), the pseudo-visionary founder of Ty Company, and the three women who essentially made him triumphant. The story is deftly told from Robbie (Elizabeth Banks), the ex-wife, Sheila (Sarah Snook), the girlfriend, and key employee Maya’s (Geraldine Viswanathan) perspective, highlighting their vital roles in making the plush Beanie Babies a strange consumer obsession, and Ty a billionaire businessman.
Jumping back and forth between the 80s and 90s, showing various stages of the company’s rise, The Beanie Bubble is amusing enough to make us invest in the emergence of its female protagonists. Although it’s Ty who’s pulling the strings — and Galifianakis is still a vibrant spectacle playing goofy weirdos — and putting on a show to capture everyone’s attention, it’s the women behind him that actually make shit happen. Banks, Snook, and Viswanathan all deliver genuinely delightful performances (their characters are fierce women who learn to stand up for themselves) that compensate for a flawed script that often lacks the courage to explore the dark side of the true tale.
The sometimes disorienting time jumps in the plot are also elevated by vivid and colorful visual gimmicks, which more or less distract us from noticing the screenplay's shortcomings. With a musical marriage proposal here and a slow-motion Beanie Baby car crash there, the stylish direction elegantly makes up for the fact that the source material might not have enough meat to last for the nearly two-hour runtime. That’s also due to the choice that The Beanie Bubble opts for depicting the company's meteoric rise for the most part and barely its inevitable collapse — thus refraining from taking us behind the scenes and showing where the real dirty stuff happens.
There are obvious signs when Ty’s carefully fabricated public image of himself (and his company) begins to crack. However, his defeat doesn’t only come from greed, which is usually the case in these scenarios, but a constant need of being in control and basking in people’s undivided and adoring attention. Ty’s weakness is his compulsions (an unsettling obsession with body image and controlling the public narrative) that start to surface the more prosperous and famous he becomes.
When that happens, the movie delivers its most fascinating moments as we watch how the women closest to him realize what an infantile and pompous fraud he is. After that, it feels rewarding and satisfying to see Robbie and Sheila — who both fell for Ty’s artificial and manipulative charm — rob the man’s plush empire that never really belonged to him in the first place. Even if we can’t help but feel the missed opportunity of not digging up all those traumas and weird eccentricities that turned him into an exploitative narcissist.
However, The Beanie Bubble has never promised to expose its protagonist and his filthy secrets but to sing the unsung song of its female champions. And in that aspect, the film succeeds by telling the uplifting story of three women and how they defeated a charismatic monster who never wanted to acknowledge their talent and give them their due. In that, The Beanie Bubble is a refreshing, if forgettable, product-themed feature that aims to highlight the real heroes behind a cultural sensation rather than dissect the rise and fall of an egotistical quasi-genius.
The Beanie Bubble is currently streaming on Apple TV+.
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