On June 3, 1999, a massive truck was side-swiped and overturned on Atlanta’s I-285 during rush hour, spilling its contents onto the freeway.
The payload: a massive shipment of “Stretchy the Ostrich” Teenie Beanie Babies, bound for a McDonald’s outlet.
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| "Success," insists Ty Warner (Zack Galifianakis), "is 1 percent inspiration, and 99 perecent presentation." New business partner Robbie (Elizabeth Banks) plays along, when the two prepare to make a splash at their first collaborative toy fair. |
Co-directors Kristin Gore and Damian Kulash open their engaging film with a re-enactment of that chaotic scene, albeit with a bit of dramatic license: full-size Beanies, a wide variety of styles, and drivers exiting their cars to grab an armful.
The Beanie Bubble — scripted by Gore, from Zac Bissonnette’s 2015 non-fiction book, The Great Beanie Baby Bubble: Mass Delusion and the Dark Side of Cute — is a dramatized account of the toy craze that captivated folks during the latter years of the 20th century, and early 21st. It’s a deliciously scathing indictment of both speculative greed — on par with the 17th century Dutch tulip craze — and the Svengali-like sway an entrepreneur held over three key women in his professional and personal life.
Although there’s no doubt Ty Warner was an incredibly gifted businessman with acute market sense, he also exploited and subsequently abandoned talented colleagues who deserved equal credit for his company’s success. Given that two also became lovers, Gore and Kulash’s entertaining film shines a well-deserved light on the fact that success, in this case, required a village of four.
Much of this saga’s depiction here is accurate; other key details are — shall we say — massaged. Gore and Kulash are up front about this, opening with a cheeky text block that reads “There are parts of the truth you just can’t make up. The rest, we did.”
Their film unfolds in a non-linear fashion, bouncing between multiple timelines that depict how Warner (played here by Zack Galifianakis) meets and soon relies upon Robbie (Elizabeth Banks), Sheila (Sarah Snook) and Maya (Geraldine Viswanathan).
Robbie — at loose ends, stuck in an unhappy marriage — enters Warner’s life in 1983, just as his fledgling toy company achieves its first breakthrough: plush cats that are deliberately under-stuffed, to make them more cuddly and lifelike. The two become lovers and partners, with Robbie’s sharp business acumen quite instrumental in building the Ty brand.
Banks deftly captures the nuanced thrill of a woman given an opportunity to emerge from an unhappy shell, to become a mover and shaker. Robbie becomes dynamic, playful and (so she believes) firmly in control of what blossoms into an exciting career. She’s also the only person who can stand up to the often imperious Warner; Banks’ steely sideways glance gets plenty of action.
Flash-forward to 1993, just as 17-year-old Maya, a college freshman heading to medical school, begins what she assumes will be a summer temp job at Ty Inc. She has an eye for color, presentation and pop culture trends; she’s also fearless, and impulsively insists that both colors of a potential new plush animal — Warner holds them up, demanding that one be chosen — are totally wrong. He concedes the point.
Viswanathan is precocious, bubbly and cute as a bug. As time passes, Maya’s “temp job” becomes a full-time obsession, much to her parents’ chagrin. She’s also a computer-obsessed visionary with a shrewd sense of What Is To Come. In one of this film’s many delightful moments, Maya dazzles Warner with a clunky first-gen modem that slowly connects to the fledgling Internet: a concept he can’t begin to comprehend.
At least, not immediately.
Elsewhere, also in 1993, Warner is hours late for an appointment with Sheila, hired to design the lighting fixtures in his new mansion. She’s furious, and blows him off; he begs forgiveness, apologizes profusely, promises better behavior. She reluctantly relents, and he begins to court her.
Sheila issues a warning: She’s a single mother primarily concerned with ensuring that her two young daughters — Ava (Madison Johnson) and Maren (Delaney Quinn) — don’t get hurt. Snook excels in this role, radiating just the right amount of wariness and suspicion, which — despite Sheila’s concerns — slowly thaws in the face of Warner’s often grand gestures.
On top of which, he’s totally attentive to the two girls, who become key “test subjects” when Warner unveils the first Beanie Babies: smaller, cleverly named versions of his larger plush animals.
Johnson and Quinn are adorable in their roles, the former endearing and adept at Ava’s emotional highs and lows, as we move into this film’s third act.
Warner is charismatic and captivatingly extravagant, in the manner of P.T. Barnum: capable of inspiring devotion, and able to sell anything to anybody. Galifianakis nails the man’s larger-than-life showmanship, but he’s less successful otherwise; his efforts at charm feel more like insincere smarm, with an undercurrent of ick.
Bearing that in mind, it’s almost impossible to accept the fact that Sheila would succumb to Warner’s advances.
On the other hand, Galifianakis excels at the man’s darker qualities, along with a blithe disregard for casual betrayal.
Tracy Bonner is solid in the supporting role of Rose, a seasoned Ty employee who serves as a link to all three women, and a sympathetic ear for each.
What follows is almost unbelievable. By sheer chance, Ty was positioned to take full advantage of the nascent World Wide Web. This, blended with the genius marketing strategy of intentional scarcity, resulted in … well … bedlam in toy stores throughout the country (depicted via both archival news footage and re-created scenes).
As for overall accuracy … Warner is still with us, albeit a recluse in the Howard Hughes mold who refuses all interview requests. This film’s three women are fictitious, although each is strongly based on a key player in Warner’s career.
Robbie stands in for Patricia Roche, an enormously successful businesswoman who moved across the pond in 1996, taking over distribution for Ty UK Ltd., which she sold back to Warner in 2005. In 2013, she became president of the Gosport & Fareham rugby team.
Sheila represents Faith McGowan, the lighting designer who — with daughters Lauren and Jenna — did indeed move in with Warner, and very likely had a strong influence on the emerging Beanie Baby line. They broke up in 2001, but stayed in touch; he attended the funeral when she died in 2013.
Lina Trivedi — Maya, in this story — is an astonishing force of nature: an entrepreneur, educator and author recognized as the woman who invented E-commerce and thus was a driving force in the Internet’s development. She’s credited with orchestrating the world’s first business-to-consumer Web site, while an employee at Ty.
Knowing this, going in, makes Gore and Kulash’s film even more fascinating. Once again, truth is stranger than fiction … and, in this case, also quite entertaining.
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