'Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy' Is The Perfect Meditation On Life, Love And Loss
The year was 2001, Tony Blair had won yet another landslide re-election, the first ever iPod had been released (much to everybody's bemusement) and Wikipedia had been birthed. Along came Bridget Jones (Renée Zellweger) in the first silver screen adaptation of Helen Fielding's bestselling novel, and suddenly the world fell in love with a character that felt at once both new and novel.
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The world Bridge bumbled into might look unrecognisable to the one we inhabit today, yet a few things have remained fairly similar in the 24 years since the first film's release. Technology's ascent — and consequent grasp — of the world happened slowly, then suddenly, while political leadership has pin-balled over the last 20 years like a metronome from good to bad, right to wrong. Throughout the tumult, our goofily hapless heroine with a penchant for XXL knickers has been a constant, her witticisms a steadfast ineffable injection of levity. So it feels only right with the world once again on the precipice of considerable change that Bridget returns in the fourth instalment of the film's franchise in Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy.
Based on Fielding's 2013 novel of the same name, in the new film we meet Bridget a few years older, perhaps a smidge wiser but no less hysterical. She is in her early fifties, she has two young kids — and she’s a widow. In the words of Bridget herself: 'Life has its light notes, and life has its dark notes.' Mark Darcy (Colin Firth) has died, and in his wake, Bridget must find the strength to not only continue, but to re-build too and it's in this moment of re-establishment that we find her.
It's not only Mark's death that Bridget's facing, but the loss of her father Colin Jones (Jim Broadbent), as well. Saliently, in true heart-in-your-mouth Bridget Jones style, his final words to her were: 'It's not enough to survive, Bridget, you've got to live. Promise you'll live, Bridget?' And so begins Bridget's search for answers as she questions how she's supposed to live, let alone survive, without the reminder of the great love of her life. You will heave with tears as much as you will with laughter.
There are threads between the first three films and the new one, too. 'It is a truth universally acknowledged,' Bridget Jones sagely professes in the first film, Bridget Jones's Diary, 'that when one part of your life starts going okay, another falls spectacularly to pieces.' There's the return of Bridget's 'Urban Family', the triumphant comeback of Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant). There are the familiar London locations, the soundtrack that lyricises the laughter and the heartache so delicately. It's a film that both the heart-filled and the heartbroken will find solace in. And it's that solace — that relatability, that feeling of being seen and known — that Bridget Jones single-handedly pitter-patters into even the coolest of hearts. Bridget is a reminder that you're not alone in whatever you're facing.
There are already those trying to argue that the Mad About The Boy ends Bridget's monopoly on one-hit one-liners, but to labour that argument misses the point of the film entirely. Bridget Jones as a character is beautiful because her life is a reminder that life goes on, and yes, there's a tragedy to that, but there's a great, searing beauty to it as well. One that Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy gets right in every way.
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