director
Sharon Maguire
screenwriters
Helen Fielding
Andrew Davies
Richard Curtis
based
on the novel by
Helen Fielding
producers
Tim Bevan
Jonathan Cavendish
Eric Fellner
cinematographer
Stuart Dryburgh
music
Patrick Doyle
editor
Martin Walsh
cast
Renée Zellweger (Bridget Jones)
Colin Firth (Mark Darcy)
Hugh Grant (Daniel Cleaver)
Gemma Jones (Bridget's Mum)
Jim Broadbent (Bridget's Dad)
Embeth Davidtz (Natasha Glenville)
Shirley Henderson (Jude)
Sally Phillips (Shazzer)
James Callis (Tom)
Celia Imrie (Mrs. Una Alconbury)
James Faulkner (Uncle Geoffrey)
Honor Blackman (Penny)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 97m
u.s.
release: 4/13/01
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
official
website
|
British
male thirtysomethings had Nick Hornby's High Fidelity
as their Bible; British female thirtysomethings had Helen Fielding's
Bridget Jones's Diary, and now both have been made into
excellent movies starring Americans. Whereas the High
Fidelity movie successfully transplanted its action from
London to Chicago, Bridget sensibly stays in the U.K.,
the better to profit from the likes of Hugh Grant, coscripter
Richard Curtis (a whiz at crafting Brit humor that isn't too
Brit for Yanks -- see Four Weddings and a Funeral), and
Colin Firth in a BBC-addict in-joke playing a suitor named Mark
Darcy (whom Fielding patterned on Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice,
played in the BBC rendition by ... Colin Firth).
Somewhere near the start of any review of the movie, there must
be a relieved acknowledgment that Renée Zellweger, a born
Texan, not only nails the most beloved woman of modern British
fiction but embodies and owns her. This will come as scant surprise
to those who followed her in Nurse
Betty and came away feeling she could do anything, including
but not limited to walking on water, though she's best when playing
lovably befuddled women who find it difficult even to negotiate
a hallway without disaster. In my review of High Fidelity,
I said you could read the book without imagining John Cusack
in the lead, but it was impossible to imagine the movie without
him; here I must up the ante and say that it's now impossible
to read the book without picturing Zellweger as Bridget.
The script, credited to Fielding, Curtis, and Andrew Davies (who
adapted the current The Tailor of Panama and also, ahem,
wrote the abovementioned Pride and Prejudice adaptation),
tracks the book's events fairly closely. Bridget, a 32-year-old
"singleton" who works in publishing, is torn between
slick bastard Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant, having a ball decimating
the dithering-nice-guy persona he's dined out on in America since
Four Weddings) and the rather bland-seeming Mark Darcy,
who has the grave misfortune of being introduced to Bridget (and
us) while dying of embarrassment in a sweater of shattering bad
taste. Bridget's mum (Gemma Jones), meanwhile, has left her kindly
but inattentive husband (Jim Broadbent) for a hideous TV huckster
with a variety of incrementally fake tans.
So, here's another romantic comedy in which our heroine learns,
both by experience and example, that slick boys are bad and nice
boys who like you despite your flaws definitely have their strong
points. Readers of Fielding's book will miss its spiky wit and
inextricably British asides (one of my favorites: "Keen
on a man who comes round late, in stark contrast to people who
come round early, startling and panicking one and finding unsightly
items still unhidden in the home"); perhaps nothing short
of a filmed audiobook could deliver the style intact. Still,
what saved the book from being the whining of a bitter singleton
(as opposed to Laura Zigman's annoying Animal Husbandry
with its stupid bull/cow theory of romance, recently adapted
as Someone Like You) was Bridget's helplessly funny, self-deprecating
take on her life, and the movie has an equivalent in its star,
who lets us feel Bridget's unhappiness and vulnerability without
soliciting our pity.
The first-time director, Sharon Maguire, is a friend of Fielding,
who based Bridget's foulmouthed friend Sharon on her. Maguire
does a smooth job of it, though shooting (somewhat unaccountably)
in widescreen and hiring Jane Campion's ace cinematographer Stuart
Dryburgh; here and there, the movie gleams when it should just
groan and sniffle with a hangover. Maguire does have a way with
easygoing slapstick, as when a drunken, forlorn Bridget lip-synchs
to "All By Myself" under the opening credits, and the
director stages what must be the most hilariously maladroit and
drawn-out fistfight since Roddy Piper and Keith David went at
it in John Carpenter's They Live. But mostly her achievement
is to stay out of Renée Zellweger's way and let her be
Bridget. Fielding published a Bridget Jones sequel (in
which, ironically, Colin Firth appears as himself), and there
are sure to be more; if Zellweger's Nurse Betty costar
Morgan Freeman warrants a franchise (see Along
Came a Spider), then this enchanting actress, brimming
with heart and soul, surely deserves her own series too. |