Bridget Jones Hasn’t Lost Her Charm
Eliza Berman | Time – September 15, 2016
It’s
been 12 years since we last saw Renée Zellweger as Bridget Jones,
instructing Colin Firth’s Mark Darcy to please propose after two
movies’ worth of indecision. When she returns in Bridget
Jones’s Baby, the third chapter in the film franchise, our heroine
is 43, single again and facing a new predicament: she’s unexpectedly
pregnant and unsure whether the miracle fertilization of her
“hard-boiled” ova resulted from a fling with an American tech mogul
(Patrick Dempsey) or one with her now ex Darcy.
The new movie departs from Helen Fielding’s novels, which inspired the
first two films. Rather than adapting her third book, Bridget
Jones: Mad About the Boy – featuring a 51-year-old widowed Bridget
– Fielding and her co-writers set the movie a decade earlier. Despite a
long gestation and the withdrawal of Hugh Grant – whose appealing cad
Daniel Cleaver was the yin to Darcy’s yang – Baby turns out to be a triumph of daffy charm.
It works because Bridget is the same lovable goof she’s always been: a
fallible normal who defies the unrealistic expectations thrust upon modern
women. Here, this extends to the fraught realm of labor and delivery.
(Drugs? Please. New-age breathing techniques? No thanks.) For anyone
who’s worn the wrong underwear for the occasion or mispronounced the
name of a remote nation, Bridget is our savior in unpolished armor. We
like her, as Darcy always has, just as she is.
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