Movie Review: BRIDGET JONES' DIARY
Green

BRIDGET JONES' DIARY
Reviewed 5/25/2001

A good-spirited well-acted chick flick, BRIDGET JONES' DIARY follows the classic romantic triangle:

The appeal of lightweight movies lies in part in their familiarity; like a roller-coaster ride we have been on before, we enjoy leaning into the curves and savoring their anticipation. Of course Bridget will first be drawn to the handsome cad, of course she will accept his casual condemnation of all-too-grim Darcy, of course the cad will be unmasked (or, in this case, unclothed with his "American stick insect" as Bridget labels her), of course Darcy and Bridget will stumble toward affection, and of course true love will triumph in the new-fallen snow.

To sell an audience on such a bit of fluff requires covering up its essential traditionalism with modern distractions like a gay friend, a foul-mouthed girlfriend, and lots of hip talk and modern references, but at root, this is the emotional story structure of Jane Austen's PRIDE AND PREJUDICE. ("If you are going to steal," a writer friend of mine has commented, "steal from the best.") Not a point-by-point bitmap (as CLUELESS was to Emma), BRIDGET JONES loosely borrows the structure, even having the same actor (Firth) play the same-named character (Darcy) as he did in the movie version (written by the same screenwriter, Andrew Davies). There are small Austen cookies: Darcy has the same long sideburns as his filmic progenitor, Bridget works at Pemberley Press (in P&P, the cad's home was Pemberley House). I suspect a closer review would find more such.

Everyone in this film enjoyed doing it. It takes great courage for Zellweger, a pretty girl prone to chubbiness, not only to gain twenty pounds of dough for the role but to display them in such comic and unflattering clothes (panties the size of Brooklyn) and postures (a freeze-frame-and-reverse sequence of her bottom sliding up and down a fire pole), not to mention the half-dozen pratfalls she convincingly takes or the excruciatingly inept speeches she is routinely called upon to botch. Jim Broadbent and Gemma Jones provide Bridget's appropriately ridiculous-and-bewildered-but-lovable and loving parents. Firth hits his marks down to the jawline flinches. But the real star is Hugh Grant, whose Dennis Cleaver is a thoroughly self-satisfied, entirely manipulative charmer who fell in love with himself at an early age and has never been disappointed in his choice. He does the most marvelous piece of mute acting in the first four seconds he is on screen, where, just by the expression on his face, we learn everything we need to know about him as a man who knows he is handsome and relishes the influence it gives him.

Gentlemen, when you are doing your chick-flick penance for the sake of good relations at home, propose seeing BRIDGET JONES' DIARY. Engaging, well scripted, well acted fun, with neither complications nor calories.

P. S. Watching this movie, we discovered that trailers fib. In the trailer (repeated in television ads), Bridget is alone in bed, the phone rings, she grabs it, "Bridget Jones, wanton sex goddess … Dad!" The film differs in three ways: Bridget has naked Hugh Grant out of focus behind her, "Bridget Jones, wanton sex goddess with a very bad man between my thighs … Mom!"

ã Copyright 2002 David Alexander Smith