Renée
Zellweger in ‘Bridget Jones’s Baby’:
Here’s What We Should Really Be Talking About
Kevin Fallon | The Daily Beast – September 16, 2016
A sexist, valueless conversation about Renée Zellweger’s appearance has distracted from the real
Bridget Jones’s Baby reveal: Not only is the movie good, it’s also important.
It’s always nice to catch up with a beloved wanton sex goddess from your
past.
And the first time you see Renée Zellweger back on screen as the
titular character in Bridget
Jones’s Baby, yes, it elicits an instant, visceral reaction from the
audience. That’s because, it turns out, it’s a pleasure to see her,
too.
An incorrigible amount of
press has redirected an
actually interesting conversation – Is a sequel to a franchise made 12
years later a good idea? – to a sexist and valueless one about
one of our most respected and talented actresses of the last 20 years’
looks. It’s missing the
point, in more ways than one.
Bridget Jones’s Baby not
only marks Zellweger’s return to a role that she hasn’t played in more
than a decade, but her return to acting after a six-year break (and return
to the practice of starring in films we actually want to see for the first
time since, honestly, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason in
2004). Watching her, you’re instantly reminded of the star’s on-screen
appeal.
That carefully studied British accent is back – Zellweger famously
underwent Olympian training to master the dialect, and never broke it
throughout the four-month Bridget
Jones’s Baby shoot.
When we re-meet our heroine, the raspy English lilt is narrating her diary
as, in a callback to the original 2001 film, Bridget is blowing out a
birthday candle alone in her apartment as Celine Dion’s “All By
Myself” blares in the background.
The role, somehow, still fits Zellweger like a glove, allowing her to
blend her natural gawkiness with a little bit of fearless bawdiness. But
the remarkable thing here is that, as we get up to speed on Bridget’s
life, we see that she has become rather poised.
In the world of franchises and the commercial mandate to “give the
people what they want,” it seems almost daring to bring back the
character believably evolved – Bridget is now a successful TV news
producer, a svelte, healthy weight, and unconcerned with romantic foibles
– rather than lazily restart her again at zero.
More, for all the sexist distraction surrounding Zellweger’s appearance,
missing was the championing of this film and this franchise as a major win
in the conversation of gender equality, representation, and opportunity in
the industry.
It’s still an egregious rarity for a film featuring female protagonists
to be considered commercial enough to merit a franchise – The Hunger
Games, Divergent, and Pitch
Perfect stick out as
rare examples – let alone for it to be a film intended for and skewed
towards an almost exclusively female audience.
The Bridget Jones trilogy
isn’t an action series. It’s a franchise of romantic comedies,
spotlighting a flawed and complicated and – though heightened – real
woman. And it
is a franchise in which all three films were directed by women. Oh, also:
The lead actress happens to be 47 years old.
While we wait (still) for there to be a superhero franchise starring and
empowering women, here we have Bridget Jones on posters and in TV
commercials, spanning 15 years of relevance. She’s not exactly saving
the world, sure. But she is a rare visible icon in an industry
commercially concerned with female invisibility. Yet let’s keep talking
about Zellweger’s eyebrows.
In some ways – though certainly not in any of the ways it’s been
rudely gossiped about and thrust confrontationally in Zellweger’s
(perfectly pretty) face – it’s natural to talk about appearance in
respect to a new Bridget
Jones film. This is a franchise that invites us to be critical about
body image in a self-aware, good-humored way, because Bridget Jones is
just that about herself.
But her anxiety about her weight or aging or not wearing the right thing
to the right occasion isn’t self-harming or mean-spirited, the way we
inflict harm on an actress and a culture that feels the negative effects
of our shaming. Bridget is insecure and trying her best and that’s why
we love her. Not why we judge her.
Watching Bridget grapple with self-confidence and self-acceptance, and
admirably set out to better herself though she still fumbles with the
tools and conviction required to do so, is comforting because it reminds
us that we’re not alone in that journey. That’s a gift that Zellweger,
in playing this part, has given to us.
We’re so lucky that she’s back doing it.
That’s not to say that Bridget
Jones’s Baby arrives
with a painless birth. Its laborious
journey to arrival spans
years and multiple directors, writers, and rewriters, with Emma Thompson
finally being brought on to rewrite the script (and co-star) and original Bridget
Jones’s Diary helmer
Sharon Maguire to direct. It takes a village, right?
What is settled on here is a story in which Bridget, having broken up with
Mr. Darcy (Colin Firth) after their seeming happily ever after in Edge
of Reason, is too concentrated on work to be concerned with men,
transforming our wanton sex goddess into more of a reasonable homebody.
Concerned over Bridget’s sexual dry spell, her coworker Camilla (Agni
Scott) insists she find herself a shag to get back in the swing of things,
kidnapping her to a music festival where she falls into bed with a
handsome stranger played by McDreamy
himself, Patrick Dempsey. A week later, she reconnects with Mr. Darcy
during a vulnerable moment at a christening for a mutual friend’s child,
and they, too, have some nostalgic sex.
When Bridget realizes she’s pregnant, she also realizes that she isn’t
sure which of the two men is the father, and the three must figure out a
co-parenting dynamic that could possibly work as Bridget weathers what is
hilariously referred to repeatedly as a “geriatric pregnancy” (Bridget
is 43) and attempts to determine which, if either, of the two men she
loves.
That so many players had a part in consummating this script is most
evident during the film’s sort of meandering final act, which can’t
seem to decide how to settle the paternity question in a satisfying
manner, all the while lingering too long on a birthing sequence that
doesn’t manage to be any fresher than the hundreds of film birthing
sequences before it.
In a way, too, it’s interesting to embark on this storyline in which
there is no real truly satisfying conclusion.
Bridget’s other longtime paramour Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant) is both
eschewed from the plot and left open for a return in future sequels
through a plot device we won’t spoil here, meaning that Mr. Darcy is the
lone legacy love of Bridget’s life vying for her heart here, boasting a
history you root for in a Ross-and-Rachel kind of way as far as paternity
goes.
But Patrick Dempsey’s Jack isn’t a cad who abuses Bridget’s
infatuation the way that Cleaver did. Rather than simply replace Hugh
Grant with a Hugh Grant-ish actor and character, the film quite cleverly
introduces Jack as the perfect guy: kind, charming, successful, and truly
in love with Bridget. History be damned, you don’t want to root against
him either.
It’s all very high concept, in the way that romantic comedies should be,
but there’s a fresh element of realism here that invigorates the genre.
This is a romantic comedy for adults, starring adults as characters with
adult concerns and problems.
These aren’t twentysomethings harping about their anxieties over
settling down as they fall in love over a series of meet-cutes and
pratfalls. These are characters who are already settled down, and
wondering how love and parenthood will upend their lives as they approach
middle age… over a series of meet-cutes and pratfalls.
We’re not reinventing the wheel here. But the wheel is altered a bit,
making for a different kind of ride. As added bonuses, we have Emma
Thompson in the car – delighting the way you expect Emma Thompson to in
a supporting role as Bridget’s doctor – as well as a comically
insightful indictment about the future of journalism as a bit of a side
plot.
In all, I expect the run of Bridget
Jones’s Baby to be
rather unremarkable: likely to receive polite reviews, likely to earn a
moderately successful box-office haul. But its existence actually is
remarkable in ways that have been buried underneath a trash pile of
cultural debate that exposes our worst tendencies as entertainment
consumers and armchair critics.
Bridget Jones has grown up. We owe it to ourselves to grow up along with
her.
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