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A very welcome return for a character
“I
can’t go back and keep making the same mistake… when I can make new
ones,” Bridget Jones confides
in her latest screen outing (released 12 years after she was last on
screen.) Jones’s latest mistake is a whopper, even by her own standards.
The world’s most famous singleton is pregnant and she can’t work out
who is the dad - whether it is the estranged love of her life, Darcy
(Colin Firth) or the equally handsome and dashing American technology guru
Jack (Patrick Dempsey), who reckons that you can design algorithms for
love. Bridget
still has the ability to make us squirm and laugh at the same time. She
still quaffs wine by the gallon. She is (literally) dragged through the
mud in an early comic scene at the Glastonbury Festival here. Zellweger
plays her just as before, with that simpering home counties accent. Years
ago when she first won the role, there was consternation in some cirlces
that an American actress had been chosen to play such a quintessentially
English heroine. Any
doubts about her Bridget have long since been laid to rest. Picking up the
role after more than a decade, she again gives a thoroughably winning
comic performance. Puckering her cheeks, looking thoroughly
flabbergasted (but also secretly very pleased) when she realiises she's up
the duff, Bridget (“the Mary Magdelene of middle England” as she is
characterised) also shows that steeliness which made her such an appealing
character in the first place. The
new film is actually an improvement on The
Edge Of Reason, Bridget's
last outing. There was a sense then that Working Title was desperate to
establish a Bridget Jones franchise but didn't know quite how to do so.
The fact that so much time has passed enables the filmakers to enrichen
the character. At
the Leicester Square premiere, Bridget's creator Helen Fielding
acknowledged that she hadn't thought she was going to revive the character
and wouldn't have done so unless it “meant something.” As
first encountered here, Bridget is 43. She is still on her own. The Hugh
Grant character has been killed off, much to the chagrin of a generation
of eastern European models. Bridget is working as a producer at a hard
news TV show. What she needs, according to a friend, is a good
“shafting". This is what leads her to Glastonbury, where she
has a fling with the handsome American. Then,
shortly afterwards, she meets her beloved Darcy at a christening and has
sex with him as well. A few weeks later, she discovers she is pregnant -
and she can’t tell which man is the father. Blame the out of date vegan
condoms. There’s no Hugh Grant-like cad in the frame. Both the
prospective fathers, millionaire dating app designer Jack and human rights
lawyer Darcy, are decent sorts. The former is a touchy feely American, the
latter is an uptight Brit but both stick by our Bridget. In fact, they
fight for her affections. The
first half of Bridget
Jones is a blast. The
script is very witty and the scenes inside the TV newsroom are an exercise
in comic mayhem. Bridget
has an excellent rapport with her subversive newsreader friend, Miranda
(Sarah Solemani), who helps lead her into romantic mischief. There’s an
enjoyably sardonic cameo from Emma Thompson (who co-scripted) as
Bridget’s doctor. In the second half, some of the comic spark goes as
Bridget, classed as a “geriatric mother,” contemplates the enormity of
what she is getting herself into and tries to choose Mr Right. The
storytelling becomes increasingly formulaic and just a little maudlin.
Even so, Zellweger and the filmmakers squeeze maximum comic value out of
the scenes in which Bridget goes into labour. (She has to be rushed across
London in the middle of a traffic jam caused by a riot for a Russian
feminist Pussy Riot-style punk band.) For all its foibles and occasional
missteps, Bridget
Jones’s Baby marks
a very welcome return for a character who, all these years on, hasn't
lost her neurotic charm in the slightest.
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