비니 버블 (영화, 2023)
"The Beanie Bubble," released on Apple TV+ in 2023, tells the story of Ty Warner, the founder of a company that produces stuffed toys, and his relationships with the women who became an integral part of his success. The toys were popular in the 1990s, collected by enthusiasts and resold, but the craze eventually faded.
Based on Zach Bissonnette's 2015 book "The Great Beanie Baby Bubble," the film unfolds the tale of Ty Warner, who partners with Robbie, an unsatisfied store employee, to start a business manufacturing stuffed toys. A decade later, their successful company, modestly named "Ty," launches the Beanie Babies line, making Warner a billionaire but tarnishing his character.
Much like Ty Warner dissecting plush kittens ("I'm not a psychopath, it's for business," he clarifies to his neighbor), the filmmakers dissect success stories from their youth with nostalgia, as seen in recent films like "Tetris," "Air: The Big Jump," and "Who Killed BlackBerry." "The Beanie Bubble" focuses on the business phenomenon of the late 1990s – a collective obsession with small stuffed toys filled with plastic pellets. Beanie Babies, aided by the internet's spread, became objects of compulsive collecting and speculation for several years.
The film, directed by nepo baby Christine Gore, daughter of former U.S. Vice President Albert Gore, and her husband Damian Kulash, leader of the rock band OK Go known for their viral low-budget music videos, presents Warner's story through three women whom he mistreated. The first is Robbie, his business partner. The second is Sheila, a single mother of two daughters who briefly dated Warner, with the daughters allegedly helping him come up with Beanie Babies. Lastly, Maya, who starts working at Ty Inc. at 17 and quickly becomes a marketing guru, manipulating the newborn internet.
These three storylines develop simultaneously, intersecting closer to the end, with the action constantly jumping between the 1980s and various stages of the 1990s – making it challenging to track where the narrative stands. However, the real problem is that it's not very engaging. None of the female stories evolve into full-fledged dramas (Warner either didn't promote someone, distanced himself, or cheated on someone), but this parade of grievances fails to evoke much emotion. Warner's character remains largely enigmatic, as we only see him through the eyes of the heroines, and the film hints at childhood traumas and complexes without exploring them thoroughly. Consequently, Warner feels like two separate personalities that never intersect, portrayed inconsistently from scene to scene.
The film lacks the visual inventiveness demonstrated by Kulash, the music video maker, and the originality one would expect from Gore, an author of several novels. Instead, "The Beanie Bubble" relies heavily on genre clichés. Its only saving grace is perhaps the nostalgic charm, as characters explain eBay to each other, and Bill Clinton occasionally appears in the background, serving as the boss of the protagonist's filmmaker father. The hype surrounding plush toys is somewhat mesmerizing and instructive, but the main lesson is that even a good story means nothing without the ability to tell it interestingly.