★★★★★
Our favourite bumbling British icon returns to our screens in Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, the fourth film based on Helen Fielding’s four-part book series. Renée Zelleweger and creators have stayed true to the eccentric magnetism of Bridget Jones in the supposed final film. She juggles grief, single motherhood, new relationships, and worklife with her infectious laughter and familiar smile.
The film begins in a markedly different tone to its three predecessors as it follows Bridget’s life four years after Mark Darcy’s death as we find out he was killed in Sudan on a humanitarian mission. The film begins with Bridget lost without her level-headed husband as she takes her children to school in her trademark penguin pyjamas and burns pasta before running out the door to Darcy’s anniversary meal. The film offers perhaps one of the most realistic depictions of grief in cinema. Four years after losing Darcy, Bridget is not bedbound in endless floods of tears but Zelleweger’s performance offers a lethargic and chaotic show of life that must go on. Bridget’s gaggle of friends are back and still offering her a collected mess of advice from Shazza, Jude, and Tom’s unanimous “get laid” to Miranda’s plea for her to get back to work. Bridget’s best advice, though, comes from her father, who tells her “you’ve got to live”, causing her to reopen that dusty diary and get living.
It wouldn’t really be a Bridget Jones film without receiving a healthy dose of male-induced embarrassing interactions. The film introduces Jones’ potential love interests in a nod to the awkward fireman pole moment in the first film when Bridget gets stuck in a tree attempting to retrieve her two children. Here she is found by her son’s strong-willed science teacher Mr Wallaker (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and rescued by attractive tree, Adonis Roxster (Leo Woodall). Bridget inevitably finds herself in ground-swallowing moments like when she is caught by Mr Wallaker buying every possible style of condom before a date with Roxster! The film comments on the complexity of dating at all ages with Bridget and Roxster’s unspecified age gap. Bridget is on Tinder, misusing Emojis and understanding the frustration of miscommunication. With both Mr Wallaker and Roxster, the film sees an abundance of shirtless scenes reinstating the playful tone of the first three movies. Despite some necessary alterations to language deemed appropriate twenty years ago, Bridget is still the same potty-mouthed, wine-glugging, and immensely human character from the first film.
For keen-eyed viewers or die-hard fans, there are several nods to the classic first film. Bridget’s “absolutely enormous panties”, her sheer shirt for seducing Daniel Cleaver, and—my personal favourite— Bridget’s son wearing an identical reindeer jumper to Darcy in the final scene. Speaking of Daniel Cleaver, Hugh Grant makes a few appearances and we actually see a meaningful friendship between the pair. Daniel even babysits her children when he is not out with terribly young, poetry-reading models, of course!
When going to see this film, I was shocked by how packed the cinema was, full of people of all ages (granted, mostly women), but it really showed how in need we are of someone so unapologetically human on screen. In the unattainable world of social media, Bridget Jones represents the unfiltered, fumbling and messy ways of a woman trying to hold everything together. As an audience we relate to a frazzled Englishwoman who puts on a tatty scarf and a smile to distract from the chaos of her life. Bridget is all of us. She represents our awkwardness, our inadequacies, and our desire for someone special in our lives. I encourage you to go see Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy—you will laugh, you will cry, you will definitely swoon and come out of the cinema with a greater love for our Bridget, who is perfect just the way she is.