Some deeply muddled non-storytelling and tonal blandness pretty much sink this movie from the outset, despite its decent cast and origins in a potentially fascinating true story. It might have been served better as a documentary, and right from the off, this feature film deploys the deeply annoying and all-too familiar get-out clause of pre-emptively giggling that it is kind of false and sort of not, flashing up the statement after the opening credits: “There are parts of the truth you can’t make up. The rest we did.”
It is adapted by Kristin Gore from Zac Bissonnette’s nonfiction study The Great Beanie Baby Bubble: Mass Delusion and the Dark Side of Cute, and directed by Gore and Damian Kulash; it tackles the little-known human drama behind the US’s bizarre “Beanie Baby bubble” tulip-style craze of the 1990s, in which an unofficial collectors’ market in limited edition lines of the cutesy Beanie Baby plush toys, driven by word-of-mouth and the fledgling eBay website, escalated prices to insane levels.
Zach Galafianakis plays a creepy and infantile Beanie Baby plutocrat Ty Warner, and those two formidable performers Elizabeth Banks and Sarah Snook play Robbie and Sheila, his two successive girlfriends, who overlapped without knowing it, and whom he betrayed and let down in various ways. They are broadly based on the two partners Warner had in real life, but a third character, the smart young Asian-American Maya (Geraldine Viswanathan), appears to be more of a composite figure based on the smart college-age people whose web-savvy Warner exploited.
Perhaps to keep all the strong female characters in play throughout the film, Gore and Kulash hop back and forth between the 1980s (when Warner was dating Robbie) and 1990s (when he was dating Sheila) … back and forth, back and forth. It’s annoying and frustrating and prevents any narrative momentum building up; when Robbie and Sheila do finally meet, the result is anticlimactic and unstitches the film’s elaborate compartmentalised fabric.
Also, there is the issue of tone. The film can’t bear simply to show the creepy side to these cute plush toys; it emphasises how relatable they are by foregrounding the kids that love them, and the grownups all have to be relatable as well. Snook is stuck with having to laugh delightedly at all Warner’s peculiar eccentricities, which don’t look adorable at any stage. Yucky Ty has to be quite sweet, even when at one moment he shows a bizarre flash of fatphobia, never explained or followed up. Perhaps Malcolm Gladwell is the man to tell the Beanie Baby story. This film fails to.
• The Beanie Bubble is released on 28 July on Apple TV+
