Renée brings out the devil in Miss Jones

By Jonathan Romney, The Independent

Helen Fielding's anxiety-ridden Bridget Jones is a heroine designed more than most to set off little sparks of self-recognition in the female reader. The film adaptation of Bridget Jones's Diary similarly knows which buttons to press to make the woman in the stalls say, "Been there, seen that, made that gaffe." In one sequence, Bridget (Renée Zellweger), following a romantic disappointment, first hits the vodka and plays a favourite record; then, in a fit of determination, bins the drink, the fags and last year's self-help books and hits the exercise bike. The record playing throughout? What else but "I'm Every Woman"? The invitation to identify could hardly be more coercive. At moments like this, the film's in-jokes and soundtrack seem so artfully pre-programmed that we could be watching the cinema equivalent of one of those lifestyle-soul compilation CDs that women's magazines occasionally sponsor.

Sharon Maguire's screen Bridget has unusually heavy expectations riding on it, partly because of the book's success not merely a bestseller, but puffed in the media as some sort of definitive anatomy of the female British Zeitgeist. And as a film co-starring Hugh Grant and co-written by Richard Curtis third in the script credits, after Fielding herself and Andrew Davies this will also be seen as an unofficial companion piece to Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill, other Working Title films that jovially promoted the British self-image as self-effacing lovable losers.

Fans of those films may be disappointed by this one's low-key bonhomie. Fielding's readers, though, need not feel short-changed, even if the script mercifully plays down Bridget catch-words like "singleton" and "fuckwittage". As it happens, the film's smooth narrative is considerably more palatable than Fielding's jerkily episodic column-turned-novel. The comedy is good-humoured rather than side-splitting, but then many of the booze-and-big-knickers gags seem specifically designed to work best on a rollicking girls' night out.

That said, Maguire (a seasoned TV and commercials director making her first feature) cannot be faulted on confidence and polish. And she certainly has a flair for casting the film is unusually rich in character playing, including the impeccably lugubrious Jim Broadbent as Bridget's father, a scene-stealing Gemma Jones as her born-again flibbertigibbet mother, Patrick Barlow as a shopping-channel Lothario, and obliging stooge cameos by Salman Rushdie and Jeffery Archer. As Bridget's office fling Daniel Cleaver, Hugh Grant is charming and floppy as ever, if only on the surface: underneath, he's a conniving creep, and it clearly comes as a relief to Grant not to be lovable for once. His rival is stiff lawyer Mark Darcy (Colin Firth), whose cautious approach to Bridget could well represent a male viewer's reaction to the film: grudgingly amused, finally charmed despite himself. The in-joke is that the character in the book is an allusion to Colin Firth's other Darcy, in the BBC's Pride and Prejudice. Yet this modern Darcy is more starchy than raffish, and clearly destined to age into a stodgy melancholic like Bridget's father which is presumably what she sees in him all along. She is caught between two classic archetypes: the Dad and the Cad. This dilemma only resolves itself when the two men finally settle it in a fist-fight, both reverting to British male archetype No 3, the Lad.

Although the film trades in the comedy of recognition, there is only so much that you can actually recognise from the real world. Bridget inhabits much the same imaginary Britain seen in Notting Hill ­a genteel fairy-tale realm where every Christmas it snows on cue and carollers wassail with lanterns aloft. Even so, this sitcom Arcadia makes a rather appealing anomaly in current British mainstream cinema, where so many films flounder in their desperate attempts to be seen as youthful, gritty and groovy. Bridget Jones's Diary is not afraid to dirty its hands with naff suburbanisms: cocktail gherkins and awful jumpers that Mummy knitted specially. In that sense, it is as close to Victoria Wood as a British film can get be and still be exportable to America.

None of this would matter much, though, if not for Renée Zellweger. For the record, the English accent is perfect, posher than you might expect yet comfortable enough for you to stop noticing it after a while. More than game at carrying off the slapstick indignities, Zellweger babbles drunkenly, falls over, essays an ungainly knock-kneed run, even gets her hair wind-blown into a monster bouffant (the nearest the film gets to Naked Gun visual farce). She may have put on 15 pounds for the part; still, it's not as if she bulked up to play Jake La Motta ­she's just a little fleshier, and altogether healthier-looking, than the average Hollywood actress. Her cheeks are a bit hamsterish, flushed and oddly glazed; she has a way of making her eyes look small and squinty; and at one cruel moment she is photographed in her fancy-dress bunny girl outfit so that her back looks broad as a rugby player's. But overall, the appropriate word is "wholesome".

Given how cosily Home Counties the film sometimes is, it nevertheless contrives to be remarkably louche. In one scene, Bridget rolls over in bed with Daniel and blissfully informs him that what he has just done is illegal in many countries. Try to imagine an American romantic comedy in which Meg Ryan intimates she's up for a spot of anal sex. In fact, the film is curiously fixated on Bridget's bottom: at one point she is caught on TV with her backside in close-up, sliding down a fireman's pole, then sits at home zapping the tape backwards and forwards to heighten the visual innuendo. This is the sort of thing that the heroines of Sex and the City would make a whole trash-talkin' seminar out of, but it is treated lightly here just something the saucy old Brits take in their stride.