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Colin
Firth Will Break Your Heart in Bridget Jones’s Baby I
did not expect to get teary-eyed in a press showing of Bridget
Jones’s Baby this
week, but so help me, there I was, blubbering away as Renée Zellweger’s
Bridget, nine months pregnant, got carried wheelbarrow-style by two men
through a revolving hospital door. In
the new installment,
directed by Sharon Maguire of the original Bridget
Jones’s Diary, 43-year-old Bridget (“the last barren husk in
London,” as she puts it) finds herself pregnant after one-night-stands
with charismatic American dating guru Jack Quant (Patrick Dempsey) and
former true-love Mark Darcy (Firth), from whom she’s separated. (Hugh
Grant’s Daniel Cleaver has been conveniently disposed of, as has much of
the plot of Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason.) Bridget chooses
not to get amniocentesis to
find out which man is the father and strings them along for the entire
pregnancy, Maury-style, falling
for both in the process. It’s
been a long time since I
saw a really successful rom-com, one whose heroine feels nuanced and
three-dimensional, whose struggles feel genuine, and one whose humor is
part of the film’s DNA instead of mere padding. Renée Zellweger is
fantastic, and easily reestablishes herself as one of our foremost
big-screen comic actors, while Patrick Dempsey’s all-American charisma
is almost enough to fill the void left by the missing Hugh Grant. But,
surprisingly, it’s Colin Firth who tugged my heartstrings the most. In Bridget
Jones’s Baby, we
learn that their relationship didn’t work out, and those things that
seemed like red flags early on turned out to be lasting issues. We see, in
flashback, a brief anatomy of their failed relationship: Mark was always
working. He couldn’t commit. He was never there. He couldn’t make her
happy, as much as he may have wanted to. Now, middle-aged and in the
middle of a divorce with another woman, representing a Pussy Riot-esque
Eastern European girl group in a free-speech lawsuit (of course), Mark’s
inability to communicate seems less like a quirky affectation and more
like a tragic flaw. The
film successfully targets our nostalgia centers, both for every iteration
of Firth-as-lover past, and for the young versions of Mark and Bridget,
whom we’ve been rooting for since 2001. In one affecting scene, Mark
fondles the ugly Christmas sweater that launched their courtship, and we
see a string of flashbacks to the first movie, both Colin-Mark and Renée-Bridget
looking young and hopeful as they embark on their bumbling three-movie
romance. Much fuss has been made of the fact that Renée Zellweger looks
different in the new film
(and indeed, poor Owen Gleiberman was so personally aggrieved he wrote a
whole essay about it). But
while Bridget feels essentially like the same person, if a little older
and wiser, Mark’s evolution as a character is more striking. We’re
used to men getting to continue to play viable romantic heroes as they get
older, even as their female counterparts get relegated
to dowdy-mom roles. Yet Bridget Jones’s Baby, the
rare film that has three equally middle-aged leads, offers an interesting
opportunity to reflect on the trajectory of a male romantic lead. In the
first film, Mark’s distinctly English brand of emotional aloofness
managed to seem charming and dashing, like a mystery to unwrap. Here,
however, in middle age, there’s something both touching and a little sad
in his very stuckness. It’s similar to how I feel about Hugh Grant as a
romantic lead; whereas his charming-cad routine used to be an instant
turn-on, now it just feels kind of depressing, like he should have left
the party years ago. (To his credit, he hasn’t done many rom-coms
lately; his most recent outing, The
Rewrite, is appropriately meta about all this.) Progressive
talking points aside, in many ways, Bridget Jones’s Baby is
a very old-fashioned film; it’s a story about choosing to return to an
old love, with all its old problems, instead of heading off in a new
direction with a “shiny new American,” to quote Bridget (of course,
for all the discussion of single motherhood, ending up alone is never
really presented as a viable option). And while we can’t help root for
Bridget to end up with Mark – a love as familiar as an old Christmas
sweater – it’s not with the same gung-ho enthusiasm we’d had back in
2001. We’re all a little bit older and wiser now. Sure, we believe that
Mark truly cares for Bridget, even if he can’t always show it. We also
know that love isn’t always enough; that Mark, like so many men before
him, might continue to be a disappointing partner, even with the very best
of intentions. I
can’t say enough about Colin Firth’s facial expressions in his film.
He has the amazing ability to communicate immense joy and great sorrow
with a single glance, even as his expression barely changes, as if he’s
trying to lock his feelings away behind a pained grimace and furrowed
brow. In one scene, Bridget reveals that she is pregnant with his baby
(maybe), and he has to excuse himself from the room, presumably to panic
in private. Then he returns, and says stoically, yet with a hint of mist
in his eyes, something like: “I think that’s the most wonderful thing
I’ve ever heard in my life.” We believe it. And later, when Bridget
tells him the baby might not be his, the full breadth of his devastation
is evident in one crestfallen glance, before he flees from the table,
unable to bear it. Unlike
the lovelorn, jilted women who tend to populate rom-coms, Bridget is the
one in control here: She is the one fending off her suitors for the bulk
of the film. Mark is clearly still fixated on her, but she’s trying to
move forward, to build a new life for herself, with a successful career
and a new group of friends (and a snazzy new tablet diary to boot).
Bridget is a ray of optimism, and you sense she’d always bounce back,
and that – most important – she’d be fine on her own, that she has a
full life without a boyfriend or husband. |