They unfold in parallel storylines. There’s Banks’ Robbie, a friend and Ty Inc. co-founder who finds herself pushed out once success arrives. There’s Sheila (Sarah Snook), a single mother of two who’s initially won over by Warner’s charisma and playfulness with her children, only to eventually discover a warped, immature side to him. And there’s Maya (Geraldine Viswanathan), a young Ty Inc. hire who presciently leads the company’s lucrative dive into the internet yet is kept on an hourly wage.
The script, by Gore, comes from Zac Bissonnette’s 2015 book, The Great Beanie Bubble: Mass Delusion and the Dark Side of Cute. (Warner was convicted of tax evasion in 2013.) In mixing up the Beanie Baby timeline to play out each storyline simultaneously, The Beanie Bubble needlessly complicates itself. But it also makes a compelling reflection of history repeating itself.
Robbie, Sheila and Maya all follow the same arc: Initial infatuation followed by the harsher onset of reality. It’s the same story for the Beanie craze, and, as the film notes in a montage, countless other bubbles that have come and gone. America, it’s said in the film, is “the land of comebacks and second chances.” Here, that means an excuse for betray one woman after another.
While those historical corollaries are neat enough, it also makes The Beanie Bubble, well, kind of repetitive. Gore and Kulash’s film is far from the first to follow such ups and downs. Outside of some easy irony given the cuddliness of the product at hand, there may not be enough that makes this iteration of such a familiar cycle especially interesting.
What keeps The Beanie Bubble from bursting, though, is the likability of its central performers. Banks, Snook and especially Viswanathan are all terrific comic actors who individually capture the exasperations of women fed up with an egotistical adolescent executive. And Galifianakis gives perhaps the best non-Between Two Ferns performance of his career. His Warner is a man whose charm, and face lifts, steadily peel away. In Galifianakis’ long line of man-children, he’s the biggest baby of them all.
‘The Beanie Bubble’ is streaming on Apple TV+ now.
