Entertainment Weekly
On the page, Bridget Jones's most attractive asset is that she's a mess. The neurotic girl is kind, clever, funny, competent at her job, and a great friend to her fellow singletons; she also drinks too much, smokes too much, obsesses too much, chatters too much, eats junk, and when it comes to men, can't distinguish between trash (which, in the book, she dashingly calls "emotional fuckwittage") and quality. Too smart to settle for the perks of ditzhood, she's also foolish enough to regularly sabotage opportunities for romantic happiness. She's a Jane Austen naïf in a "Sex and the City" world. When the book came out in 1996, readers went nuts. At last, an antirole model for the rest of us! On
the screen, where Bridget Jones's Diary has been adapted from Helen
Fielding's hilarious best seller by documentarian and first time feature
director Sharon Maguire (an old friend of the author and model for the
heroine's journalist pal Shazzer), Bridget's most attractive asset is that
she's played by Renée Zellweger. There was a hoo and a ha when the Texas
born Ms. Z was chosen, over plenty of terrific local talent interested in
the plum role, to play a bird of such English habits (American women
stopped smoking in movies ages ago - bad for the product endorsement
deals, babe). But Zellweger is, in fact, thoroughly charming and
believably British in the role. Her confidence in her own flexibility as
an actor has visibly grown in just a year following the great reviews she
received for her performance in "Nurse Betty," and she glows
with the pleasing fullness of the 20 pounds she so famously added for the
part, all angles softened. (This is not what "fat" looks like;
this is what ripe, sexy health loks like, and she needn't have dropped the
weight afterwards - except, perhaps, to eat lunch again in the demented,
scale obsessed town of Hollywood.) "Bridget Jones" shines with lemon scented polish and tootles along with a soundtrack that ain't too proud to use Jamie O'Neal's cover of Eric Carmen's "All by Myself," Aretha Franklin's "Respect," and Chaka Khan's "I'm Every Woman" as directional signals. But without mess and agitation - without trusting viewers to withstand the sight of genuine heartache, and compulsiveness, and a glimpse of real self destructiveness (it needn't involve wrist slashing - a simple hint of a devil in Miss Jones will do), this great screwup of a woman - one of literature's best antidotes to self help hysteria in the 1990s - is almost indistinguishable from, oh, the sylphy single woman played by Ashley Judd in "Someone Like You," or by Gwyneth Paltrow in "Sliding Doors," or by Hope Davis in "Next Stop Wonderland," or by Ally McBeal or any sitcom sister anywhere in prime time. After Daniel Cleaver has dumped her (she's an old cow and he was looking for a new cow, to filch from the psychobabble in "Someone Like You"), Bridget throws a dinner party to celebrate her birthday. She can't cook, true, but her lack of skill is endearing and everyone laughs, full of wine. Darcy can cook, he's gorgeous, and he thinks she's fab. "To Bridget… who we love just as she is!" her friends toast in her cozy little kitchen, each object in the room imported by the production designers to signify offbeat domesticity. Well, of course, why wouldn't they? The movie never shows us anything about Bridget that's remotely in need of psychological or physical fixing. |