*** (out of ****)
Starring Renee Zellweger, Colin Firth, Hugh Grant, Gemma Jones, Shirley Henderson, and Jim Broadbent
Directed by Sharon Maguire & written by Helen Fielding, Richard Curtis, and Andrew Davies, from the novel by Fielding
2001 R
Bridget Jones, the fictional creation of British author Helen Fielding, is always being attached to adjectives like “outrageous” and “irreverent.” But I think a more astute word would be “normal.” The film based on Fielding’s book begins with the narration “in my thirty-fourth year of being single.” The way Bridget says this lets us know she is a creature of almost no self-esteem who, like the rest of us, just wants to feel loved. All her actions—her recklessness, her fumbled speeches, her sloppy conversations, and her plentiful insecurities—are in pursuit of this one desire. Her actions may or may not remind us specifically of how we behave, but her yearning for affection rings true. We come to realize that the bizarre predicaments in which she finds herself are just exaggerations of the embarrassment we feel when we seek out love and acceptance.
In “Bridget Jones’s Diary,” Bridget (Renee Zellweger) becomes involved with a bad man and a good man. We know which is which right away, but then again we’re not the ones falling love. She falls for the wrong one and forgets to ask if they’re going to have a real relationship before they tumble into gallons of reckless sex. As Jack Lemmon says in “The Apartment,” “you take a girl out for some fun a couple nights a week and suddenly she thinks you’re going to get married.”
The good man is, not surprisingly, direct and sincere, even if Bridget initially mistakes that for being rude and snide, while the wrong man is the kind who’s won by indirect flirtation. Bridget gets him by flirting with other men, ignoring him, and otherwise making things difficult. When her mother leaves her father (Jim Broadbent), Bridget advises him to flirt with other women in order to win her back. This is, of course, tantamount to lying. A movie that wants its heroine to succeed through being true to herself, and not by being who other people want her to be, will not let her be happy through deception.
The cad is played by that master of the insouciant, Hugh Grant. He makes a great entrance, walking in slow motion off the elevator into Bridget’s office, and looking over the world, not with the eyes of a predator or a sex-maniac, but like a man in love with everything life has set out for him to enjoy. He’s dashing, charming, has great hair and looks sharp in a blazer with no necktie, and delivers a non-stop stream of vulgarities that he makes sound like Shakespearean sonnets. The man who says what he means and means what he says is the terrific English actor Colin Firth. He got to play the cad in “Shakespeare in Love,” but here he is essentially playing the same role he did in “Pride and Prejudice,” as a man who rolls his eyes at the games and niceties of being sociable, and seems a little pissed off all the time.
The great Jim Broadbent plays Bridget’s father as a stammering nice guy, not unlike his Oscar-winning turn in “Iris,” and the relationship he shares with Bridget makes them the grown-ups while shuttling off his wife as immature. And then there’s Renee Zellweger, in every scene of the movie, shucking off her Texan drawl in favor of a Londoner’s accent, and plumped up from a skinny starlet to the size of a normal female you might meet out in the real world. She gives us constant updates on her weight, her drinking, and her smoking; her bottom and thighs are self-consciously prominent in so many frames, not to exploit her, but to let us now how she must feel, going out into the world with them at less-than-perfection. She is both needy and intelligent, and her lips always seem to be working a little too hard against her cheeks when she’s talking, in the same way she’s working too hard to make sure someone will love her.
Bridget’s romances take place over a year as she moves from her first job to a second. Both jobs involve desks and offices and coffeemakers and computers but, for the most part, what they are is of only tertiary importance. There’s a lot of Bridget walking with her head up high, or involved in various montages of activity, usually set to optimistic disco beats. Director Sharon Maguire is an able-bodied craftsperson, gifted at letting the actors work, and making us feel high when Bridget is love and low when she is despondent. “Bridget Jones’s Diary” is also thoroughly English when it comes to dialogue and insults—Hugh Grant has to be heard to be believed—and there’s a truly English fistfight in a pub in which the two combatants breathlessly apologize between punches for every table they break and every glass they knock over. The screenplay is the work of Fielding, Andrew Davies (who wrote screenplays for “The Tailor of Panama” and various “Masterpiece Theatre” endeavors, including “The Way We Live Now”), and Richard Curtis, who is probably worshipped as a god somewhere for his writing on the British comedies “Mr. Bean” and “Black Adder.”
It’s a fun journey with Bridget. In the end, after having seen all her faults, I almost felt she wasn’t good enough for the guy who finally ends up as her beau. He was too nice, too likeable for her, but then I realized this feeling was in the movie’s favor. I felt the way she must feel, that love is not something earned, or deserved, but something that just falls from heaven. We know we’re with the right person when we feel we’re getting more than we could possibly have a right to.
Finished March 12th, 2003
Copyright © 2003 Friday & Saturday Night