Yes, it is of the time. It is impossible to critique because it is now a cultural institution, as are the stars as bright as Hugh Grant, Colin Firth or Renée Zellweger. We return to Bridget Jones’ Diary so often because it is comforting. You can remember the punches and pulls of it after the first time because its beauty is in its simplicity. A film carried by an especially indifferent director playing the Grant game, the cat-and-mouse detail of a woman wanting a big change in her life and yet falling to the very constant desires of those around her. Parents, lovers, friends, they pull her in all sorts of directions and, for the most part, into poor situations. And yet that is not a slight on Sharon Maguire, who sticks the camera in the right places and takes real care with where this story goes.
Maguire is magnificent in a way that makes her almost invisible as a creative. The isolated spots of Jim Broadbent smoking atop a mushroom feeling for some late-stage love in his life while Zellweger punches all the right buttons of a confident but hapless lead. This charm is, in more than a few ways, part of the embarrassment and constant slip of ups and downs found in Bridget Jones’ Diary. Without this frenetic energy, without those maudlin needle drops which signify some sad act or depraved madness, we would not be lost at sea. But it is the formula of the times and these times of loved-up romcoms did not have all that long left, not in the sense of consistent qualities. Bridget Jones’ Diary is, while relatively solid and often plain in its straightforward adaptive ways, a last bastion for the genre which has not been rekindled until very recently by the likes of Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell.
They are very much the next steps in this monumental romcom revival, and yet we can find traces of the same will-they, won’t-they, in Bridget Jones’ Diary. Daniel Cleaver (Grant) is the gaslighter keeping the anger in the audience alive, and the charming performance from Grant all part of that. Zellweger is the comedic fall yet, even after punch after punch of these dramatics, comes out on top. Firth as Mark Darcey, while underwhelming in his stoic approach to the role, is eventually cracked open. What Bridget Jones’ Diary still gets right though, is the outrageous and extreme reactions we have to big moments. Those events in our lives, be it love lost or gained, big job changes or grief, bring on this immediate response where drinking heavily or lying on the floor with Bob Dylan blasting in noise-cancelling headphones is the only way to get through.
Perhaps it is in the obvious core that these moments of surprisingly relevant and still-modern reactions and character tics. Those relationships which insist upon others, the camaraderie found where it is, ultimately, needed most. Bridget Jones’ Diary is an institution for British cinema as a light and frizzy rom-com watch because its breezy pace is made all the better by sharp writing. But nostalgia is a beast, one we should err on the side of caution when encountering it. Bridget Jones’ Diary, thanks to those magnificent flourishes, its lighter-than-light approach to love in comedy, is what separates it from the soppier occasions which fill the rom-com genre.
Even its more obvious pointers, the Van Morrison needle drops, feel rather sharp. They carry on from scene to scene, holding it together more than the plot manages. What is maintained is a sense of purpose in every action. A year in the life of Jones flies over, as life itself does. In its breakneck pace, there is such a cacophony of emotions, such a rapid pace to never catch onto anything, that it blurs together. Bridget Jones’ Diary works because of how the diary entries inform these moments of sudden change, the information never stops and the turmoil never relents. It makes all the difference for a film which, ultimately, stands tall as one of the finer moments in light British film. Nothing snooty about it, just great fun. This is nowhere close to anti-comedy but it feels sudden enough, consistently nutty, that it holds an anti-comedy energy.
Blue soup here, spots of genuine friendship there, these parts of Bridget Jones’ Diary are all part of its fabric and are so truly difficult to replicate. It continues to the rest of the films in the series and it may be absent in the fourth instalment, yet to come but missing a crucial piece of the puzzle and not shying away from the fact. It remains to be seen if Cleaver turns into a seedy man with a seedy blonde but it was never the point of the first in the series. A film of manipulation, of great humour, and a tribalistic nature. A fight between Cleaver and Darcey is replicated in the follow-up to a less fulfilling extent, but nonetheless there.
Breaking up a fight with some scene of different occasion, of celebration in the face of violence, is not unique to Bridget Jones’ Diary, but it does carry itself with such a dedication to both its romantic aspects and comedic flavour that it cannot be helped in thinking it was written in a state of mania, adapted in an adrenalin-pumping trip. But then those are moments, not the whole package. Jones and the rest of them are played out like one-note observations rather than human beings. There is an inevitability to a rom-com of these proportions, and enjoyable as it is, as rigid it may be as a load-bearing wall in the house of British Cinema, it is a fundamentally flawed and rather hollow feature. In these vapid occasions is a sense of wholesomeness. Even in its darkest moments, it finds those spots of brightness, the lucidity to make even its most heartbreaking and tender parts, the Broadbent and Gemma Jones subplot, worthwhile.
Bridget Jones’ Diary, of course, works most of all when the romantics are in full works. Zellweger is an exceptional lead, still is. It checks all the boxes of what a British film should be. That is not so much a list as it is a feeling. A guttural understanding of this actor being there or that song planted in place. Such is nostalgia. It is a film about feeling fine with yourself but always in the shadow of isolation, in pursuit of some clawing happiness. What do we do when we get to happiness? Nobody knows. It is why there are three sequels to a story with a supposed happy ending. Bridget Jones’ Diary is not given enough credit yet feels bloated in its chatter. An Academy Award-nominated movie with a sincerity at its heart which makes all the difference, and yet a film which is troubled by its inevitable shortcomings, its desire to not even bother with the fundamentals of romcom filmmaking. It makes it all the better.
