The Innocent Ways Of Renée Zellweger

By Molly Haskell, The New York Times - April 8, 2001

That Renée Zellweger has become something of a household name, even in the nouveau-riche enclave of the New Jersey mob, can be gleaned from an episode of ''The Sopranos'' in which Edie Falco's Carmela lays into Father Phil.

The sweet-talking priest bounces through the kitchen door, a bottle of wine in one hand and a videocassette in the other, hoping for an evening of television and empathy. But unknown to him, several nights before, Carmela had come to the church with a homemade special, only to catch him in pasta delicto with her best friend. Now, to top it all off, he has the nerve to tell her the cassette is ''One True Thing.''

''I don't want to see that,'' Carmela explodes. ''I told you I didn't like Renée Zellweger!''

Father Phil looks shocked. And confused. Like any sloppy two-timer who can't keep the tastes of his ladyloves straight, the serial confessor has been unmasked. In the 12-step-speak that is the show's comic vernacular, Carmela charges him with being addicted to the ''whiff of sexuality'' he gets ministering to his female flock.

That an affair of pasta and empathy should terminate over Renée Zellweger seems almost impossible to believe. How could anyone, even a hardened Mafia wife, be immune to the little blond charmer from Texas? And yet it may be precisely that winsomeness that grates on Carmela. An obvious temptress Carmela could deal with, even relate to. But this embodiment of innocence in a rancid world may be what drives the disillusioned and desperate Carmela crazy.

Ms. Zellweger's freshness and lack of calculation seem an unfair advantage in a world where women have grown wan and weary tolerating infidelity and pondering their less-than-numerous options. To Father Phil's ear, how can Carmela's nasal Jersey caste twang, a voice that could curdle fresh ricotta, compare to Ms. Zellweger's little-girl trill?

Or could it be simply that the goofily natural and bubbly Ms. Zellweger is not the type Carmela and her friends admire, being the antithesis of the brassy clotheshorse who seems to set the standard for suburban arriviste chic?

In either case, Ms. Zellweger's new film, ''Bridget Jones's Diary'' (opening Friday) should drive Carmela up a wall. Complete with English accent and an extra 20 pounds on her tiny frame, a slightly chunky Ms. Zellweger is about as disarmingly charming as anyone could be. As the desperate singleton Bridget Jones -- klutzy, dressed in dowdy Marks and Spencer duds, a fashionista's nightmare -- she nevertheless manages to win, convincingly, the hearts of two breathtakingly attractive men: Hugh Grant as the infamous Daniel, Bridget's womanizing boss, and Colin Firth as Mark Darcy (reprising his heartthrob role as Jane Austen's hero in the BBC ''Pride and Prejudice.'') Mr. Grant has dropped the faux-innocent mannerisms of recent films and is more appealing as a bit of a sleaze than he ever was as a male ingenue, while Mr. Firth manages, with one sexy glower, to summon up all those misogynistic heroes of 19th-century women's novels who are brought back to life by the sheer spunk of an unconventional heroine -- in this case, a girl with a heart on her sleeve and knickers on her bottom.

What's extraordinary is how deftly the movie's writers -- Richard Curtis (''Notting Hill'' and ''Four Weddings and a Funeral'') collaborating with the author, Helen Fielding herself -- have adapted the book and its heroine to the softer and more human contours of Renée Zellweger, thereby radically changing its tone. The book is nothing if not witty as it charts the marital desperation of thirtysomething women and their elusive lovers, their work- and love-related catastrophes, and skewers both the self-pitying singles and the ''smug marrieds'' in the process. Each of the fictional Bridget's diary entries begins with an itemization of that day's weight, calories consumed, drinks drunk, cigarettes smoked, often accompanied by an appropriate note of self-congratulation or (more often) denigration.

I found myself laughing out loud more than once -- until suddenly I wasn't laughing any more. I began skipping the check list and grew increasingly embarrassed, or appalled, by the obsession with body weight (especially when Bridget's averaged an enviable 125) and the fatuity of the lives. Perhaps it hit too close to home, reminding me of my own obsessions -- but when I was 14, not 30. In its fixation on sex, its view of the office as a place to work off a hangover and pass time between dates, it seemed grotesquely reactionary -- either part of the new, girly-girly anti-feminism or a throwback to the 50's. O.K., at 14, I discovered boys, and all the creative juices that had gone into poems and short stories were diverted into dating and dressing. At the end of each weekend, I graded my boyfriends from 1 to 10, as religiously as newspapers today cover the box office grosses on Monday morning. My teenage journal was ''Bridget Jones's Diary'' without the wit. But haven't we all evolved since then?

I imagined Bridget as a sort of Ally McBeal, neurotically focused on sexual and body-image inadequacies and specters of spinsterhood while being infuriatingly young, chic and attractive -- not wide of the mark given the microskirts and couture savvy of the heroine of the book.

But Renée Zellweger is another kind of heroine altogether. She removes the sting of the book's portrait of generic women whose only purpose in life is to marry despite ghastly images of wedlock, and makes Bridget entirely, delightfully particular. We're not forced to endure every fluctuation of Bridget's weight, and Ms. Zellweger brings such sweet earnestness to the character's career flubs that they seem more like triumphs than defeats.

The film places Bridget in an even tackier suburban backwater than the one in the book, and Ms. Zellweger's lack of urban sophistication, her impulsiveness, is one of the most endearing things about her. Like Judy Holliday, another cuddly ''dumb'' blonde who wasn't as dumb or as fragile as she seemed, Ms. Zellweger stumbles along in her movies appearing vulnerable to every predator and peril, saying anything that comes into her head, yet managing through some kind of divine protection -- a Buster Keaton-like imperviousness to disaster -- to survive and flourish with her soul intact.

The movie was directed by Sharon Maguire, a documentary director whose first feature this is. A real-life friend of Helen Fielding's, she figures in the book as Sharon, or Shazzer, Bridget's fierce feminist ally. If Ms. Maguire occasionally errs on the side of broadness, one of the very literate delights is the way book and movie, film and literature, play off each other; this is intertextuality with a vengeance. The real Hugh Grant is mentioned in the book as British tabloid fodder, his emerging unscathed after the prostitute episode the envy of male Brits everywhere, while in the movie the actor plays a publisher whose star author is the (also real) Salman Rushdie.

Austen's ''Pride and Prejudice'' is the beating pulse of ''Bridget Jones,'' the book and the movie, of course, and in one of the wittiest updates, the novel's subplot of Lydia's flight with the wicked Wickham has been aptly and hilariously modernized so that it is the heroine's mother, not her sister, who leaves the nest (for a career!) and falls for a bounder (the lounge lizard Julio).

Having conquered British chauvinism and enlisted Ms. Zellweger as Bridget, Ms. Maguire and company have understood her idiosyncratic appeal and given her the part of her life. For instance, the movie makes much of the fact that Bridget and Mark knew each other as tots, played together in the paddling pool. But in the movie you actually see this scene, not just in the backyard birthday party home movies that charmingly conclude the film but in Renée Zellweger herself: the child is always present, miraculously peeking through.

(Or almost always: Carmela should have let Father Phil watch ''One True Thing,'' in which Ms. Zellweger is the opposite of adorable as the career woman who comes, grudgingly and reluctantly, to care for her dying mother, played by Meryl Streep.)

It was the Zellweger of ''Jerry Maguire'' that set the stamp of her persona: Ms. Zellweger as the forlorn single mom, more like her own little boy than like the sadder, wiser, more skeptical women gathered in her sister's living room. You can imagine her Dorothy sidling up to you -- much as her kid captivated Tom Cruise's Jerry -- and slipping a sticky hand into yours and worming her way into your heart. In ''Bridget,'' as in her best roles, there is a complex play of emotions when Ms. Zellweger is shocked, hurt or happy: she is always slightly sad when funny and slightly funny when sad.

Our post-romantic world of Freud, feminism and premarital sex has made it harder to believe in love-forever narratives. Recent movie romances like ''Sweet November'' have failed because they resorted to hoary plot devices to resuscitate the beast, as if the stories could be revived without the repression and reserve that generated them. But somehow Ms. Zellweger, with her natural shyness, her enchanted unworldliness, manages to restore the wonder and mystery. In her case, the mystery of love itself, the fact that the women that men fall for are not necessarily the raving beauties.

To behold the mystery in all its blinding strangeness, watch Morgan Freeman when he sees her for the first time in ''Nurse Betty.'' His aging hit man is sitting at the counter of a diner, while Ms. Zellweger's waitress, glued to the soap opera starring her great love (Greg Kinnear), pours coffee over her shoulder into his cup. The look on his face expresses, at one and the same time, his absolute rapture at this strange, delightful creature -- and his no-less-absolute bafflement as to why he should suddenly feel this way.

As Bridget, Ms. Zellweger is not a pushover by any means, or entirely lovable: she guzzles chardonnay, gossips, is a little too ''needy'' in current psycho-parlance and can be as tart-tongued as any Austen heroine. One look at Mark Darcy's reindeer sweater when they first meet and her Bridget is as withering as any fashion snob, as prone to prejudice as Austen's Elizabeth Bennet.

Yet the real joke is that her own get-up is at least as ridiculous, and the oversize bloomers she wears, grotesquely revealed in her tryst with Daniel, are a ghastly (and wonderful) joke on the whole array of spicy apparel -- thongs, bikinis, lacy come-hithers, push-up bras -- endlessly promoted as aphrodisiac accoutrements. Like the woefully clad Bridget, Ms. Zellweger's genuineness seems to extend to an indifference to fashion; certainly she needn't have gained as much weight as she did to convey a plump and ungainly Bridget. With her small frame, the merest suggestion of avoirdupois would have done; yet she carries off the feat almost as a challenge.

So clueless is she as a fashion plate, so girl-next-door real, that Vogue magazine, no doubt alarmed at the subversive impact she might have on women's couture, mounted an offensive in this month's issue, taking her to the Paris shows, wining and dining her with the likes of John Galliano and Jean-Paul Gaultier. Assuring us that she ''is an unusually receptive woman'' who felt ''honored to be admitted into the presence of so many designers and to have been granted access to this special world,'' the editors did a ''My Fair Lady'' number on her, dressing her in trippy outfits, posing and photographing her as the next Audrey Hepburn. It didn't take: on Oscar night, where the prevailing look was sleek and sexy, silvery and adult, she came across as a child dressed in mommy's clothes -- harsh blood-red lipstick and a bright yellow dress, which obliterated her pale complexion and was too drapey and sophisticated by half. I, for one, wasn't the least disappointed. We've got plenty of My Fair Ladies, drop-dead divas and conventional cover girls; but Ms. Zellweger possesses something more precious -- call it a feeling of inner goodness that doesn't translate into chic and shines from her unadorned face. The actress has lost Bridget's extra pounds, but let's hope she never loses the magic that makes her such an unusual star.