One morning recently I arrived at my "real job", the one as a Web developer in a quasi-state agency, the one that pays the bills (and my site hosting costs), only to find an e-mail reminding me that my sexual harassment class is this Thursday. Presumably this is, like the "weapons of mass destruction class" I was required to attend a few months back, for informational purposes and not a course in "make and deploy."

Bridget Jones, the heroine of Helen Fielding's bestselling novel and the film bearing her name, could probably get more use out of this upcoming class than I will, although because she is thirty-something and unmarried, she is not offended by e-mails from her boss saying things like "I like your tits in that sweater".

Said boss is the usually nauseating Hugh Grant, in the new picture based on Helen Fielding's novel/cultural phenomenon, BRIDGET JONES' DIARY. A very loose retelling of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, DIARY purports to tell of the trials and tribulations of the aforementioned Bridget Jones (Renee Zellweger), a postfeminist, angst-ridden, man-crazy publishing company drone, who eats too much, drinks too much, smokes too much, and in case you're thinking this is starting to sound too much like a pre-Glen Ballard Dave Matthews Band song, imagines herself dying an old maid, alone, being devoured by a pack of feral dogs.

Well, maybe it IS starting to sound like a pre-Glen Ballard Dave Matthews Band song.

Actually, what it sounds like is every other media portrayal of the thirtysomething single girl these days, from Ally McBeal to the libidinal clotheshorses of HBO's Sex in the City. Do you know young women like this? I don't. Granted, at almost-46, with a fifteen-year marriage under my belt, it's easy for me to talk, but I do know my share of single women, and most of them are either in stable, long-term, companionate if not torrid relationships with little to no thought of marriage; or else are too picky to waste their time with the current crop of available men, who seem to consist entirely of devotes of The Man Show. What they do NOT do is sit at home, eating jelly out of the jar, singing bad covers of equally bad pop songs, bemoaning their old maid-hood.

This being the product of a bestselling novel seemingly written specifically for the movies, however, BRIDGET JONES' DIARY takes place in a magic realm in which fat girls have protruding collarbones and space between their thighs when they walk, look great in bikini underwear, and can find straight-cut, sheath dresses to fit, instead of shopping for size fourteen skirts at Avenue and thanking God for creating big, sassy black women who have enough self-esteem, whatever their size, to wear fuschia so that stores like that can exist, because God knows white women would rather continue their futile dreams of Gwyneth Paltrow-hood by tossing money at Jenny Craig.

Oh yeah. And in this magic realm, fat girls are pursued by not just one, but TWO handsome, tall, thin, tortured English guys, one of them being the stolid but entirely crushworthy Colin Firth.

But this is where this story's resemblance to MY particular fantasy world ends.

Because BRIDGET JONES' DIARY is a romantic comedy in the tradition of the truly excreble Notting Hill (with which it shares Hugh Grant and a co-screenwriter that accounts for Bridget's doughty, colorful circle of friends) and FOUR WEDDINGS AND A FUNERAL (with which it also shares Hugh Grant, which accounts for Bridget's doughty, colorful circle of friends), as well as a Jane Austen ripoff, you know that Our Heroine will have a disastrous affair with her Unsuitable Suitor (Grant), while all the while ignoring the stifled, but adoring gazes, of Mr. Right (Firth).

That's all you need to know about the plot, because you've seen this movie fifty times already, and if you're like me, hated it each time.

As insulting as BRIDGET JONES is to all single women and even more significantly, to all of us who are heavier than Renee Zellweger, even WITH her much-vaunted twenty extra pounds (which look great on her, by the way), it's saved from being a total mess by some reasonably crisp dialogue and terrific performances.

It takes about fifteen minutes to become acclimated to Zellweger's just-slightly-too-Masterpiece-Theatre British accent, especially because it makes her sound astonishingly like Kate Winslet. As a result, I spent the entire first half of the picture thinking that Winslet would have been absolutely dynamite in this role, only she would have portrayed Bridget as being empowered and confident, and goodness, we mustn't have THAT, now, mustn't we? So instead we have Zellweger, with her scrunchy little nose-twitches and gravelly, faux-baby-girl voice, yearning her way through the picture's seemingly endless one hour and forty minutes. Zellweger's soft facial lines make her look zaftig even when she's skinny, but if this gal weighs variously 136 to 140 pounds, then the rest of us might as well just put the gun to our heads and pull the trigger right now. Vulnerability is Zellweger's stock in trade, and her "Please don't hit me" verge-of-tears aura serves her well in Bridget's more embarrassing moments.

In a role like this, in which the character is supposed to revel in her sexuality, Zellweger suffers from Julia Roberts syndrome. Utterly devoid of any kind of mature sensuality, and equally cognizant of her role as America's OTHER Sweetheart, Zellweger spends her sex scenes with Grant still wearing much of her underwear. Zellweger is no Samantha from Sex and the City; instead, her Bridget seems to use sex as a bargaining tool in a vain attempt to buy love from her caddish suitor. Nevertheless, Zellweger is a surprisingly gifted physical comedienne, perhaps a legacy from her relationship with Jim Carrey. However, Bridget's lovable ditziness quickly wears thin for anyone who thinks that behaving like an eighteen year old when you're thirty-two is no longer adorable.

BRIDGET JONES is now the second movie (the first being Woody Allen's Small Time Crooks) in which Hugh Grant leaves behind his "aw-shucks-ain't-I-adorable" stutters and hair-flipping, fitting effortlessly into the cloak of Charming English Bounder. Grant inhabits this sort of role so effortlessly that I suspect the Real Hugh is more like this persona than the insufferably adorable one to which we've been subjected for most of his career . At 41, Grant is rapidly turning into one of those British Actors Aging Badly, so this evolution will probably extend his shelf life. He hasn't been this tolerable since The Remains of the Day, the last film in which he didn't stutter.

Nevertheless, how any woman could even look at Hugh Grant when Colin Firth is in the picture, I have no idea. Firth, an versatile and accomplished actor who's such a chameleon that you've seen him in 157 pictures (including Valmont, Shakespeare in Love, A Thousand Acres and The English Patient) without him ever registering on the radar, is the film's in-joke. In Fielding's novel, Bridget is infatuated with Colin Firth's portrayal of Mr. Darcy in the 1994 miniseries of Pride and Prejudice, so who better to portray the similarly-named Mark Darcy than Mr. Firth himself,reprising the seemingly wooden, clenched-jaw performance that registers a lifetime of suppressed emotion in every glance and every word.

For some strange reason, Firth has spent much of his recent career portraying buffoonish cuckolds who lose their women to one or another fellow named Fiennes, from Lord Wessex in Shakespeare in Love to the ill-fated Geoffrey Clifton in The English Patient. Yet Firth has more sex appeal in his pinky than either of those guys; certainly more than Hugh Grant, and if BRIDGET JONES is redeemed by anything, it's that Our Boy Colin finally gets the girl.

The great Jim Broadbent is his gloriously zhlubby self as Bridget's cuckolded, but loving Dad, but the equally great Gemma Jones barely registers as Bridget's mid-life crisis mom. This is the kind of role that used to be played by Margaret Tyzack, and Jones is neither doughty enough nor brittle enough to carry it off.

The film seems overly long even at 98 minutes. A film this utterly predictable would be better served as a Sex and the City episode. BRIDGET JONES' DIARY is a perfect companion piece to Notting Hill, and if you loved that film, you'll love this one. If you didn't, however....

-- Jill Cozzi

Review text copyright © 2001 Jill Cozzi and Cozzi fan Tutti, © 2003 Mixed Reviews. All rights reserved. Reproduction of text in whole or in part in any form or in any medium without express written permission of Mixed Reviews or the author is prohibited.

Back To Top | Home | Archive | E-Mail Harvest