Film Marcus Berkmann
BRIDGET JONES’S BABY (15) ANTHROPOID (15)
Like many third films in a series, Bridget
Jones’s Baby (15) is less good than the first one and better than the second. Bridget is now 43 and, bizarrely, looking it, although you will stare at Renée Zellweger’s face throughout this film, wondering exactly what she has done to it. (My guess is that she wonders the same.) Colin Firth returns as Mark Darcy, the shy, slightly pompous equivalent of his famous Fitzwilliam Darcy in the 1995 BBC version of Pride And Prejudice. But he, too, is looking his age, which, as it’s pretty close to mine, I found thoroughly reassuring. It’s a strange old film, this, starring people who are no longer in the first flush of youth but who need to behave as though they are for dramatic reasons. Bridget, in particular, has developed a silly walk as extreme, in its way, as John Cleese’s. How could anyone have reached such a senior position in broadcasting who flaps around like a duck-billed platypus? Presumably she was interviewed for the job sitting down.
The film begins with a fine joke, the funeral of Hugh Grant’s naughty Daniel Cleaver, attended by literally hundreds of leggy Eastern European models. But then it drifts for half an hour or so, as the empty, scurrying London lives of these not particularly attractive characters become apparent. Everyone lives in wondrously huge properties and earns a billion pounds a year and looks just so, but they are all miserable and thwarted and, underneath it all, terribly nice, in a way that you neither believe nor find particularly funny. But then Bridget, after two nights of passion with two different men, becomes pregnant and the film takes off. Which of the men is the father? Bridget doesn’t know, and she’s too scared of giant needles to take the test to find out. Emma Thompson enters as a slightly brusque obstetrician and illuminates every scene she is in. Now the film is actually about something, it cracks along at a fine pace, and you’re suddenly willing to ignore some of the more abstruse plot points, things that simply wouldn’t happen in real life. When Bridget has her baby, for instance, there’s immense whooping and hollering at her workplace, at the sort of hysterical, un-british levels that take place in films but never in west London. But there are many satisfying moments of broad comedy, and the birth itself is more like the two I myself have witnessed than any others I have seen on screen. The fact that two out of three writers and the film’s director are women may have something to do with this.
Anthropoid (15) is a very much bleaker proposition and probably not to be watched on a full stomach. It’s about the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in 1942 — Operation Anthropoid, as it happens — and stars Cillian Murphy and Jamie Dornan as a couple of agents of the Czech government-in-exile, parachuted into Prague to knock off the Obergruppenführer. For some reason they and everyone else talk in barely comprehensible middle-european accents (while the Nazis talk in rat-a-tat German accents), but after a while you forget all about this as the absolute tension of the story overwhelms you. Will they manage it? And as we know that Heydrich did die as the result of the only successful government-organised assassination of a top Nazi during the Second World War, will they get away with it? The final battle at Prague’s cathedral, carefully recreated on the backlot, is a magnificent sequence. But you will walk out of the cinema a lot more slowly and more thoughtfully than you walked in, and possibly like a duck-billed platypus, if you’re Bridget Jones.