Galifianakis, who plays Warner, is almost unrecognisable in this role, which could be his best performance to date. By all accounts, Ty was a charming egotist who was obsessed with his own image, including his actual face, which he had regularly tweaked with plastic surgery. It’s a departure from Galifianakis’ comedic roots but he’s absolutely believable and superbly eccentric.
While Ty Warner is the axis around which this film spins, it’s really about the three women that he screwed over and how they were able to triumph despite his attempts to hold them down. It’s also about a very specific time in the tech revolution when internet shopping was in its infancy and eBay was just being launched. It was a time when we were still isolated from the US in ways that have been eroded by the internet. The Beanie Baby bubble just wasn’t a thing here. No one was selling Beanie Babies on Trade Me for tens of thousands of dollars and becoming independently wealthy from them, in fact, they weren’t even sold here until after the bubble burst.
The Beanie Bubble is an adequate film: good performances, great 80s and 90s nostalgia and a somewhat interesting story of a megalomaniac entrepreneur. It’s reminiscent of Air, the Air Jordan story by Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, but casts a more critical eye over the fallacy of the business mastermind in a way I appreciated. It’s not going to whip up a viewing frenzy like Barbenheimer but it’ll be there in the wasteland to fill the content drought ahead.
HE SAW
The Beanie Bubble opens with this “hilarious” disclaimer: “There are parts of the truth you just can’t make up. The rest, we did.”
Ugh. As a way of turning me against this movie I wanted to like, they could not have done better. I wanted with all my heart to immediately turn off the TV, unsubscribe from Apple TV+ and write an angry review focused entirely on those two sentences.
If you want to make up a story, make up a story. If you don’t want to make up a story, tell a true one. To fail at both and then introduce your failure with a joke is the very definition of shamelessness.
My bigger issue with it though is the double standard that applies to the telling of true stories on print vs screen. As if the economics of the internet and predatory social networks had not already tipped the scales enough against those of us who write for print, when we tell true stories we are expected to tell them accurately, while Big Streaming tells them however they want, which is the way most likely to enrich Bob Iger or the ghost of Steve Jobs.
More unforgivable than these unforgivablenesses, though, is that, for all the liberties it took with the truth, The Beanie Bubble is dull. It wanted to make a point about the exploitation of women, and it did that effectively enough, but as it became clear the movie had moved into its denouement, I wondered where the rest of it had gone.
It felt like the stories of the three central women were just getting interesting as the credits began to roll and I couldn’t help but think that if the film-makers had cut the movie’s first half and kept going for an hour after its end, it might have been vaguely interesting. As it was, it felt most like a movie whose sole reason for being was to get Zach Galifianakis an Oscar nomination. The few words of on-screen epilogue text contained more intrigue than all the preceding on-screen action combined.
After the excitement of the preceding fortnight’s big-screen blockbusters Barbie and Oppenheimer, this movie felt thin, trite, understuffed. It’s ironic that a movie about the bursting of a bubble itself seems to represent the bursting of a bubble. Straight to streaming might not be an insult anymore, but on the strength of this movie, it might be making a comeback.
The Beanie Bubble is streaming now on Apple TV+
