She’s back with a bump or two
Bridget Jones’s Baby: ★★★✩✩
After 12 years and heaven knows how many calories, diets and satisfying post-coital cigarettes, to say nothing of anxious precoital cigarettes, she’s back.
And judging by the intense excitement at last night’s glitzy world premiere in London, she’s been much missed.
the bigger question is whether she’s as ready for us as we evidently are for her. Does the hapless Bridget Jones still reflect the times? Does she still embody female neuroses about body image, and finding Mr right, as perfectly as she did when renee Zellweger first brought Helen fielding’s literary creation to life on the big screen in 2001, and again three years later?
Yes and no. As the title of Sharon Maguire’s film implies, Bridget has moved on. One of the two loves of her life, Daniel Cleaver, the oily character played by Hugh Grant, appears to be well and truly dead. the other, Mark Darcy (Colin firth), appears to be happily married.
Meanwhile, she is as hopelessly accident-prone as ever – a trait some of us consider more irritating than endearing - but has reached an age when the search for Mr right becomes less important than the search for the right maternity bra.
Who, though, is the father of her unborn child? We were promised connubial bliss at the end of the last film, Bridget Jones: the edge of reason, but, frustratingly for those who liked to think of her enjoying a happy-ever-- afterlife, and felicitously for the filmmakers, nothing lasts for ever in Bridget’s universe. except unexpected weight gain, of course.
So she and Mark have long since split up, and although she now has a (crashingly improbable) career as a TV news producer, everything is looking desperately bleak on the romance front until, always a sucker for a charmer, she sleeps with a matchmaking website mogul, a hunky American called Jack (Patrick Dempsey).
He seems lovely, a good chap to have a fling with. But then she bumps into Mark again at a christening, and bump is soon the operative word. Suddenly, there is a new set of swirling uncertainties in her life, led by the big paternity question.
the script, written by fielding, along with Dan Mazer and emma thompson, who pops up as Bridget’s no-nonsense obstetrician (is there any other kind?), is consistently amusing, without delivering quite as many laughs as the first film, also directed by Maguire.
Still, I saw it with my 23-year- old daughter, who loves all things Bridget Jones and loved this. there’s a very funny scene when the two men carry Bridget into hospital to give birth.
And I also laughed out loud when Bridget, along with both putative fathers, who are equally delighted at the prospect of parenthood, attends an ante-natal class. the teacher not unreasonably assumes she is the surrogate to a gay couple.
the performances are all terrific. It’s nice to see Jim Broadbent and Gemma Jones back as Bridget’s parents, and Sarah Solemani has a delightful turn as a TV presenter.
As for Zellweger, whose looks and love life have been subjected to even more intense scrutiny than Bridget’s over the years, she rises admirably to the challenge of playing her most famous character in middle age. especially bearing in mind that at 47 she is somewhat older than her alter ego (though of course that’s 47 in movie-star years, which are like dog-years in reverse).
If she is let down at all by the writers, it is perhaps that she hasn’t grown quite enough with the times.
take the arena of technology. there has been a social media revolution in the last 12 years, and surely Bridget, always a bit of a twitterer, would have embraced it?
But never mind. this is, on the whole, a worthy completion of the trilogy – assuming that it is to stay a trilogy, and that we are not likely to assemble again one day for Bridget Jones’s Dentures.
Bridget Jones’s Baby opens in cinemas on September 16