Mad About the Boy is the best Bridget Jones sequel yet – and Renée Zellweger remains sensational
Exalt her as a feminist icon, or decry her obsession with “having a bottom the size of Brazil” as fuel for several decades-worth of body-shaming hysteria – it doesn’t really matter, Bridget Jones is ours. She belongs to the culture, for all the good and toxic thinking she represents. And she has been since 1995, when Helen Fielding first started publishing her column about the Chardonnay-guzzling, chain-smoking perpetual singleton in the pages of The Independent.
And it’s in that sense of ownership – that she’s our Bridget – that her latest cinematic venture, Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, succeeds where previous sequels have fallen face-first, perhaps into a musical festival mud pit à la Bridget Jones’s Baby (2016). She’s more vulnerable here, more honest, and a touch less defined by her frazzled quirks. That’s thanks, in part, to the fact it’s based on Fielding’s third book in the series, which draws from the author’s own experiences of grief in order to explore a Bridget (Renée Zellweger) who exists beyond Mark Darcy (Colin Firth) and Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant).
Here’s the current state of play: Darcy is dead, killed by an unexploded mine while on a humanitarian mission. Cleaver is not, because, despite Grant’s insistence that he would not star in the previous (third) film, it both granted him a funeral and a sneaky resurrection. Bridget exists, now, in stasis. She’s the mother to two brilliantly patient children who don’t bat an eye when they’re running late and their spaghetti dinner is on fire. She’s also the widow who, not entirely by choice, has become “effectively a nun”.
After some encouragement from friends – Sarah Solemani, James Callis, Shirley Henderson, and Sally Phillips are all back, alongside Emma Thompson in the role of a withering gynaecologist – Bridget once more cracks open the diary and bags herself a double-dip of romantic suitors. Up first is a 29-year-old biochemistry student everyone seems fine with calling Roxster (Leo Woodall, of The White Lotus and One Day fame). Trailing close behind is science teacher Mr Wallaker (Chiwetel Ejiofor), who’s really more Mr Darcy than Mark Darcy ever was – stubborn and uptight, yet still irresistibly dashing.
Yet director Michael Morris deals with Bridget’s combative love life with far more care and subtlety than first sequel The Edge of Reason (2004) ever did. Screenwriters Fielding, Dan Mazer, and Abi Morgan may strive for relevance by squeezing in an episode of “ghosting” (ie not texting back), yet Bridget and Roxster’s age-gap romance – like last year’s Anne Hathaway-fronted The Idea of You – puts aside “cougar” sensationalism to engage sincerely with the idea of navigating love while at different stages in life. And Zellweger, who at this point wears the role like a second skin, never overplays a scene. Bridget is a woman of the people, after all, because she represents how we use performative cheeriness as a defence mechanism. Wine and power ballads take care of the rest.
And, sure, both male leads are handed a scene in which circumstance forces them to remove their shirts, all while Bridget’s eyes look like they’re about to pop out of her head (“ding f***ing dong” as the saying goes), but the Bridget-isms here work with a little bit of a wink and nod, so that even the inevitable appearance of the “big knickers” doesn’t play too overtly as calculated nostalgia.
Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, then, is about all things in balance. And that includes having Hugh Grant swan in for a hilarious couple of scenes, but no more. He’s the olive in the martini. According to the actor, he wrote much of the part himself, including the refreshingly nuanced view of Daniel Cleaver as both an excellent babysitter (when he’s not teaching kids how to make a “filthy bitch” cocktail), and a terrible father, with a son in Italy he barely speaks to. When it comes to Mad About the Boy, it’s less that Bridget Jones has finally matured, and more that she’s shown us how human she really is.
Dir: Michael Morris. Starring: Renée Zellweger, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Leo Woodall, Jim Broadbent, Isla Fisher, Colin Firth, Hugh Grant. 15, 125 minutes
‘Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy’ is in cinemas from 13 February
