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Bridget’s
just like Bambi with a fag in her mouth... TONY
PARSONS ON WHY HE’S FALLEN V. V. DEEPLY IN LOVE WITH MISS JONES. IF,
AS seems increasingly likely, Bridget Jones’s Diary turns out to be the
most successful British film ever made, then it really couldn’t happen
to a nicer girl. It
is so much more than just a chick flick. Men will be dragged off to see
Bridget under duress by the woman in their lives, but will find themselves
slowly but surely falling for the most loveable screen hero since Bambi. Bridget
is Bambi with a fag in her mouth and a bad man between her thighs. Bambi
had those big doe eyes, coltish legs and a dear little bottom. Bridget
Jones has the chubby cheeks of your favourite hamster, a larger bottom and
a milky complexion that seems permanently flushed with embarrassment,
shame or desire. It
was impossible not to love Bambi. And as the box office returns show, it
is impossible not to love Bridget. Oh, be mine, Bridget! Be mine! On
the printed page, Helen Fielding’s heroine struck a chord with millions
of women but left most men stone cold. To
paraphrase Mark Darcy at the start of the movie - she drinks like a fish,
smokes like a chimney and frets about her love life, not to mention her
love handles. That
might have been enough to win the hearts of the modern miss, but the
average guy always went limp at the thought of Miss Jones. Who needs it? On
the big screen it is a very different story. On the screen - although
Bridget still worries about the bulge in her buttocks and the lack of a
ring on her finger - she is touched by real cinematic magic. And it is a
magic that appeals equally to men and women. Three
cheers - hurrah! hurrah! hurrah! - for Renee Zellweger, who had to pile on
the pounds to play Bridget. Remember Robert de Niro’s Jake La Motta in
Raging Bull? Bridget Jones’s Diary is Raging Cow. Although
Bridget Jones’s Diary is, on one level, a very slick romantic comedy by
most of the team that brought you Four Weddings And A Funeral and Notting
Hill, it has a core of something radical that makes it much more than just
another story about toffs in love. Renée’s
Bridget is no screen goddess and no Vogue model. She has the plumpness
that comes with self-pity (all those nights alone tucking into Chardonnay
and chocolate - oh, v.b). She
frequently dresses like a refugee from Oxfam. And, like all of us, she
regularly acts like a complete idiot - falling for the wrong person,
coming out with a load of rubbish when trying to be clever and generally
making a very human mess of her life. But
you can’t help but love her. That’s the clincher. None
of it matters. Every failure, every social embarrassment, every public
humiliation only makes you love Bridget just the way that she is. That’s
why men and women of all ages are falling in love with Bridget Jones’s
Diary and why it will eventually become the ET or Star Wars of British
cinema. Zellweger’s
Bridget doesn’t look remotely like a film star. The blonde Texan shot to
fame in Jerry Maguire, playing a single mother opposite Tom Cruise. But in
that film, although Renee was supposed to be an ordinary woman struggling
to get by, she looked a million dollars. In
Bridget Jones’s Diary she really does look like an ordinary English
girl, forever torn between the gym and the boozer, with both a life and a
figure that is undeniably pear-shaped. Yet she is beautiful (her scared,
hesitant little face, looking like an Andrex puppy that has been cruelly
treated). She
is endlessly likeable (all the girl wants is love, a mini-break and a
crate of white wine). And
she is dead sexy - sexy not in a glossy magazine, look-but-don’t-touch
perfect way, but sexy in the way that real women are sexy. You always want
to pull down her enormous pants. Let
me put it like this. When her fat little bum comes sliding down that
fireman’s pole in those sheer black tights, any red-blooded male wishes
that he was that fireman’s pole. It
is not just the way Renee Zellweger looks that makes Bridget Jones a
ground-breaking film. Beyond all the laughter - and there are plenty of
laugh-out-loud moments - there is a real, palpable anger in the film. Against
men who lie, cheat and knob around. Against married couples who think they
are better than the rest of the world. Against office lechers
(tits-pervert, tits-pervert, tits-pervert!), against beautiful bitches who
nick a good girl’s man, against old men who think a single girl is
gagging for it. In
her own sweet-natured, stammering way, Bridget Jones does more in two
hours for the rights of women than Germaine Greer and the other feminists
have done in thirty years. BRIDGET
Jones’s Diary is a film that is in love with women - real women with all
their faults, foibles and flabby bits. Although
lightly played, it is a film with a very big heart, containing two of the
greatest performances you will see on screen this year - from Renee and
Hugh Grant, whose anal-fixated cad is a portrait of comic genius. Let’s
stop knocking Hugh, and start treating him like a national treasure. Some
of the critics have carped about Zellweger’s English accent or the
script’s romantic portrait of our country. I can’t see anything wrong
with Bridget’s accent. It’s true that her dialect ranges from pony
club to Groucho Club, but so does the accent of many woman working in the
London media world that Bridget Jones inhabits. The
modern metropolitan miss can veer from country estate to council estate
depending on her audience. And
as for the script’s rosy-eyed portrait of England, that’s fine by me.
Snowy winters, London streets that glow like gold, young people flying
about in minis (cars and skirts) as though it’s still 1966 and all that.
England
is romantic. London is romantic. And don’t you think that Hollywood has
been giving us a romantic portrait of New York for the last fifty years? Like
many people, I was bored to tears by the Bridget Jones industry. The old
girl had been milked to death, I believed. But this warm-hearted, big-bottomed film has changed my mind. You just can’t hate Bridget Jones. It would be like hating Bambi. |