While it’s not exactly “The Beanie Bubble’s” fault that it’s being released at the tail-end of a film cycle that has seen every inch of corporatized IP mined for stories about the wonders (or horrors) of capitalism — “Air,” “Blackberry,” “Tetris,” and even “Flamin’ Hot” come to mind, all with varying degrees of success — it’s also fitting that such a historical footnote would be last out of the gate. Somewhat feeling like the eighth option on a McSweeney’s list of products in need of a gritty reboot, Kristin Gore and Damian Kulash’s film takes what, perhaps, should’ve been a three-minute section on “I Love the 90s” and expands it, for better and, ultimately, worse.
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It’s a film that often feels written by an algorithm, jumping back and forth in time to recount the rise and fall of Ty Warner and his eponymous company Ty Inc. If the film reads as paint-by-numbers, it also, paradoxically, features one of Zach Galifianakis’s best performances, embodying the Beanie founder with a type of curdled man-child energy that plays to his strengths.
But Galifianakis, and Warner, really play second-fiddle to a trio of women that Gore and Kulash foreground — splitting narration between his co-founder Robbie (Elizabeth Banks), assistant turned marketer Maya (Geraldine Viswanathan), and fiancée Sheila (Sarah Snook) — each of them falling for Warner’s outsize persona before, eventually, being screwed over by him.
The three give solid performances, and the decision to centralize these women is structurally interesting, finding parallels to how Warner treated the women in his life, both romantically and in his company, but such a schematic design also flattens them into archetypes — the jaded co-founder, the underappreciated employee, and the reserved lover — instead of differentiating them. The filmmakers’ attempt to graft an empowering feminist narrative onto the story is noble but doesn’t feel fully realized or in line with the events that are being depicted.
Further, the screenplay constantly moves back and forth from the early inception of Ty Inc. in the 1980s, and Warner and Robbie’s decision to understuff Himalayan cats to middling results, to their almost blind stumble into the lucrative market of Beanie Babies in the ’90s. The section focusing on the explosion of the Beanie industry — which coincided with the rise of the internet and, more specifically, eBay — is the most fascinating. Yet, one wishes that a film titled “The Beanie Bubble” spent more time on the cultural implications of such an investment fad and how Warner essentially self-sabotaged his own company with his profound indifference to secondary markets and outright disdain for collectors.
Instead, the Beanie Baby of it all is almost treated as a window dressing for yet another narrative of a maniacal CEO stumbling into mass amounts of wealth almost by accident and burning all of his relationships down in the process. Snook, Banks, and Viswanathan are great, but their characters are constantly defined by their relationship with Warner, to the point that we know little about them otherwise. Sheila’s only defining character trait is the fact that she’s a mother of two daughters.
Also, no matter how many references to Bill Clinton are thrown in or how often someone makes fun of AOL, the rise and fall narrative is never given the specificity needed for these types of stories. Say what you will about the corporate agenda and politics of “Air,” but at least it had a sense of time and place.
Despite these structural and thematic problems, the film is almost compulsively watchable on an aesthetic level. Gore and Kalush give the entire piece a slick design — aided by Steven Meizler’s colorful cinematography and Molly Hughes’s production design. This probably isn’t surprising to anyone aware of Kalush’s other job as the lead singer of OK Go, a band that is more well known for their gonzo music videos than any individual songs they’ve released (that Gore is not only his wife but also Al Gore’s daughter would make a good bar trivia question).
Only time will tell if “The Beanie Bubble” represents the final dying gasp or merely the end of first-wave product-driven narratives. But, like Beanie Babies themselves, one hopes that this bubble will burst sooner rather than later. [C-]
