Arriving hot on the heels of Barbie’s good-natured, pink-hued takedown of the patriarchy, The Beanie Bubble may be the cuddliest critique of capitalist greed and workplace sexism of the year.
Kristen Gore’s cheery screenplay, adapted from the 2015 book The Great Beanie Baby Bubble: Mass Delusion and the Dark Side of Cute, by Zac Bissonnette, chronicles one of the internet’s first crazes: the buying and selling of the pellet-stuffed fluffies of the title. Beanie Babies were the creation of Ty Warner, the elusive billionaire behind the toy company Ty Inc, brilliantly played here to creepy-cute effect by Zach Galifianakis.
Other names have been changed as the film skips between three chronologies. In the 1980s, Robbie (played by Elizabeth Banks) cofounds the company and becomes Warner’s romantic partner. Maya (Geraldine Viswanathan) is a college student on minimum wage who markets Beanie Babies online, where they take up most of the sales on the newly created eBay. Sheila (Sarah Snook) is a young mother whom Warner ostentatiously woos.
All of these women are, in one way or another, marginalised within the company they helped to shape, but not before Beanie Babies became the United States’ favourite toy and “investment opportunity”.
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The fanatical Beanie-buyers in the film are mostly strait-laced suburban moms. And they are strangely terrifying. “We didn’t set out to make America lose its mind, but that’s what happened,” says Robbie.
Gore, who directs with her partner, Damian Kulash, maintains a giddy tone that sometimes sits uneasily with temporal shifts that mirror the narrative complexities of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. The needlessly busy structure is easily offset by appealing performances from Banks, Snook and Viswanathan and by a keen critical eye for the mad free-for-all economics of the Bill Clinton era.
The Beanie Bubble is on limited cinema release and on Apple TV+ from Friday, July 28th
