Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy is the fourth and final film in the series and gives our Bridge the fairytale ending she really, fucking deserves.
It’s been 23 years since Bridget Jones’ Diary delivered one of the most iconic single gals in all of cinema (and literature). The world has, for over two decades now, savoured and absorbed into regular usage lines like “Come the fuck on, Bridget!” and “Skirt off sick” and “I’m off to Bedfordshire” and “Everyone knows that diaries are full of crap”.
Mad About the Boy delivers all of the Bridgety traits we love – the awkward-charming meet-cutes, the physical comedy, the pack of supportive wine-glugging mates who sprinkle the film with nuggets of comedic gold, Emma Thompson’s sassy gynaecologist, sad old Daniel Cleaver, and a pair of extremely attractive love interests – without letting Bridget fall into an object of ridicule as it goes. This is a send-off that revels in redemption and maturity, particularly as the film opens with Bridget as low as she’s ever been: Mark Darcy has died and Bridget is a grieving widow and single mother of two young children.
The grief, the sense of loss, is handled beautifully through the film. I sobbed so loudly at one point that I set myself and my friends off into snorting hysterics. Colin Firth’s Darcy gently haunts Bridget’s life and lets Renée Zellweger show off her nuanced acting chops. Her signature crinkly-eyed smiles spill over with tears of love and pain. Zellweger as Bridget reveals the unfathomable confusion of loss as well as the great fortune of owning loving memories of the people who have left us.
Bridget and Darcy’s children are also well manoeuvred. They’re very much central to the story (their poor little broken hearts!) but they’re not put in the position of carrying it. The film still focuses firmly on Bridget the individual, only now her experiences, for better and for worse, have multiplied and enriched her: her familiar chaos now informs how she parents and that is delightful, loving, vulnerable, and open-hearted mothering. She is hard on herself: ashamed of what she sees as her shortcomings (particularly when she’s comparing herself to the uptight, overdone school mothers) which makes Bridget as relatable as she ever was.
Apart from perhaps her wealth. Bridget now lives in the posh part of already posh Hampstead in London in a lovely stony home artfully covered with ivy (not too neat, just like Bridget herself). There’s an early attempt at the beginning of the film to show that while Bridget is a rich single gal now, she’s not rich to a snotty or psychotic degree. There’s a very odd cameo by Isla Fisher who plays an unhinged neighbour: we meet her dressed fully in what looks like Vivienne Westwood and throwing keyboards and mice (electronic ones) out a top floor window and shouting something about screens as her three little kids stare up at her from their pretty garden gate below. And that’s her whole bit: we never see Isla Fisher again. This director would have snipped the whole scene out as it added nothing, only an extra hard dose of “Bridget might have loads of money but she’s not deranged because of it, like Isla Fisher”.
But what about the boy? It-boy of the moment Leo Woodall (sneaky fuckboy-cum-criminal in White Lotus season 2; troubled fuckboy-cum-heartbreaker in One Day; mathematical mastermind and possible fuckboy in Prime Target) plays 29-year old Roxster (Roxster?! Not quite enough piss was taken), the lad who breaks Bridget’s four-year dry spell as she’s adjusted to life without Mark Darcy. Woodall is luscious and the romance between them lets us revel in a middle-aged, single mum who is desirous and desired, beautiful, confident and fun. The entire storyline is a reversal on the humiliations of Bridget’s past: the party scene in the first film where she shows up as a Playboy Bunny is flipped into a party scene that gifts us the ultimate riff on Colin Firth’s Pride & Prejudice Darcy-in-the-lake-with-the-wet-shirt. Roxster gets properly soaked in a perfectly silly scene involving a not-drowning puppy: and the tittering crowd who once felt sorry for a young Bridget is now delighted for, and in awe of, her as she enjoys a great big pash, soaking wet shirt and all.
Naturally, Roxster isn’t the only man after Bridget’s attention. Mr Scott Wallaker (played gracefully by Chiwetel Ejiofor) is a teacher at Bridget’s son’s school. He’s awkward, annoying with a whistle, and boringly black and white when it comes to matters of metaphysics. He is a convenient character: childless but yearning, charming but not cocky. Wallaker isn’t a particularly convincing character but the point is that he fits Bridget and her family, and not the other way around. One can forgive a lightly sketched love interest when there is such a strong female character in need of her final era of romantic and familial bliss.
But it’s not Bridget Jones without Hugh Grant’s irredeemable Daniel Cleaver. He is, as always, a highlight. Cleaver is a limp sort of anti-hero these days: fuzzy round the edges, still chasing skirt, only now he’s aware he’s running from his own inevitable mortality. Bridget’s open-heartedness redeems Cleaver: she loves him, just as he is. A self-consciously tragic, scared ageing man with heart issues who babysits her kids and teaches them how to make dirty bitch cocktails. Unlike the previous films, here, finally, Bridget has the upper hand: she has no interest in him romantically but is an unwavering support to his fragility. It’s a glorious, empathetic way to elevate them both from entanglement to a golden age of maturity (even if Cleaver never grows up).
At the heart of Mad About the Boy is an intention to show just how far Bridget Jones has come. It’s a far more satisfying story than Bridget Jones’ Baby, which teetered too far towards the tacky. This last hurrah is weighty without losing any of its comedic light. Despite the loss and pain in her life, or perhaps even because of it, Bridget is thriving: the film offers a middle-aged woman who is excellent at her job (“the best producer we ever had”), who is a loving mother, a joy to be around; she is messy, wise and warm. It’s a refreshing, lighthearted but far from candy-covered, homage to facing mortality and smiling and swearing and singing at it (there’s a banging soundtrack including Eartha Kitt, David Bowie, Fatboy Slim, and The Clash). Mad About the Boy is the ultimate affirmation of “I like you, Bridget. Just as you are.”
Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy is screening now in cinemas across Aotearoa.
