Reviewing the Beanie Bubble: A Burst Waiting to Happen – Hot

Something’s in the air over in Hollywood, because we’re looking at year chockful of product films. We’ve had films like Air, Tetris, Barbie, Blackberry, Flamin’ Hot, and now The Beanie Bubble joins the fray. The film focuses on three women – Robbie (Elizabeth Banks), Maya (Geraldine Viswanathan) and Sheila (Sarah Snook) – and how each of them got screwed over by Ty Warner (Zach Galifianakis). Just to be clear, quite a bit of this film is fictional and not based in truth.

We’re told from the beginning that the film isn’t about Ty Warner, and it’s meant to be about these women who helped facilitate the beanie baby craze. Strangely, the film itself forgets its own objective, as Ty is the pretty much the one character that gets properly developed over the course of the film. Sure, he’s a narcissistic egomaniac, but he also gets to be more than that. Galifianakis manages to make the character so compelling, someone who demands perfection maybe because all he can perceive is imperfections when he looks at himself in the mirror.

The women, however, are only developed as far as the narrative requires. The film is so focused on the roles they played in the whole beanie baby craze that it doesn’t concern itself with who they are outside of it. The issue here is the non-linear script, which takes us on a merry ride on how the pieces all come together, but doesn’t offer much insight into how these characters became who they are over time.

When Ty and Robbie first came up with their plan, they were idealistic dreamers. Both of them were stuck in lives that suffocated them. Robbie was working at a job she doesn’t enjoy in order to support her disabled husband Billy, while Ty’s been living under the thumb of his father. The two stay in the same building, and bond after Robbie comes over to offer her condolences for Ty’s father’s passing. Ty is the one with the innovation and ideas, but Robbie is the one who helped him build the company from the ground up. So what happened to them that they became so consumed with money and the bottom line? How did their friendship spiral into something so toxic? We’re not given the answers, as if we’re just meant to assume that capitalism eventually corrupts and destroys.

Banks, being the incredibly skilled actress that she is, actually makes the role meatier than it is. You can feel Robbie’s suffocation in her relationship with Billy, and her utter devastation when she discovers Ty’s betrayal. Snook, who plays Sheila, also delivers a poignant, gut-wrenching performance with the limited material that she got. Ty lures Sheila in with promises of playing house, and she falls for it despite her guard being up, finally seeing the truth of who he is towards the end of the relationship. It is a tad weird to see Snook and Galifianakis as lovers on screen, given their age difference, and it seems the film knows it too, since the pair are always portrayed in a platonic manner.

Maya is the daughter of Indian immigrant parents, who moved to America to give their children better lives. When she starts out as an intern for Ty’s company, she’s still studying to be a doctor, but finds herself eventually deferring that dream in order to help Ty launch his own. She helped pioneer internet marketing for the company, and despite all the work she does, gets paid a measly 12 bucks an hour. In her story we see a hardworking woman whose efforts ultimately paved the way for an unqualified man to snatch it all away from her. The game is rigged, we are told. And then the film backtracks by airbrushing away any unpleasantries for Maya, Robbie or Sheila.

The Beanie Bubble is so intent on seeing these women succeed that it forgets to make them real, and that’s the real shame.

Review screener provided.

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