Bridget Jones's Diary

By Jon Danziger, DVD Review

No, the romantic comedy hasn't gone away - it's just put on a couple of pounds, grabbed a pack of Dunhills and a bottle of Cabernet, and hopped across the pond. Bridget Jones's Diary smartly reinvigorates the genre; in many respects, it's a very conventional movie in its storytelling style, but it's full of enough new truths and has such a sharply drawn title character that it's easy to see why, on page and on screen, it became such a cultural phenomenon. This isn't a movie that breaks a whole lot of cinematic ground, but it's become something of a cultural lodestone, especially in bringing to the screen a significant percentage of the moviegoing audience who felt as if they were underrepresented: that is, professional young single women, managing the pressures of work, love, and sex in the city. 

Renée Zellweger, the pride of Texas, plays Londoner Bridget Jones, and she earns high marks all around - kudos to her and her dialect coach for the consistency of her convincing accent, and to her dietician as well. Bridget is frankly carrying more than few extra pounds, and Zellweger gained the appropriate amount of weight to play the role - this is a character who doesn't shy away from another drink, or from eating Ben & Jerry's right out of the carton, and who would rather grab another smoke than a quick workout at the gym. She's not unlike a good number of us in that respect, and one of the tensions in Bridget's life is between being candid about her own body, and tyrannized by the insanely waifish, malnourished models held up as paragons of beauty. She's a terrific and winning character - always a little jaundiced about whatever comes her way, not afraid to take risks, and suffering more than her share of very public embarrassments; you need not be a single woman in London in your early 30s to share in her joys and miseries. 

As it turns out, she becomes the linchpin of a love triangle unrivaled since Katherine Hepburn had to choose between James Stewart and Cary Grant in The Philadelphia Story. On the one hand, there's Daniel Cleaver, her dashing, priapic boss; on the other, there's Mark Darcy, a barrister with less swagger but a better heart. Zellweger is well matched by her two leading men - as Daniel, Hugh Grant is at once winning and scummy, the sort of guy who scores with a lot of women, then treats them like dirt and moves on. (He's the guy that the rest of us guys hate.) In some respects this is the definitive Hugh Grant performance; he shares that rare quality with very few other actors (Alec Baldwin comes to mind), in that he's not bashful about taking a role that's going to make the audience detest him. 

As Darcy, Colin Firth doesn't have nearly as much flash, but he's charming in a befuddled sort of way, repeatedly finding himself undone by encounters with Hurricane Bridget. Firth's hangdog quality couldn't be more winning, and we're rooting for him and Bridget to get together, which is about all you can ask for in a movie like this. Director Sharon Maguire presides gently over the affair, and she's got an especially keen ear for music - she doesn't shy away from corny pop songs, ranging from All By Myself to It's Raining Men. Some bits of the movie feel like comic bits that don't contribute to the story, but are holdovers from the source material - Bridget's disasters in the kitchen fit in here. But adding breadth and depth to the story are Bridget's parents - Jim Broadbent is so sweet and befuddled as Bridget's heartbroken father, whose wife has left him for a man with skin the color of a tangerine, who shills cubic zirconium on a home shopping channel. You can't ever be sure where true love is going to come from, and one of the many lovely things about this movie is that the title character is not a hopeless romantic, but a hopeful one.