Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason


by Shari L. Rosenblum

Hollywood's second foray into the diary of Helen Fielding's supremely identifiable singleton -- Bridget Jones -- is aptly named. It is precisely at the edge of reason that the filmgoer finds herself -- wondering where the world went wrong -- watching as her hapless heroine sacrifices satire for slapstick and renounces subversive self-mockery to serve herself up as the literal butt of the joke. The camera has turned cold on Bridget, and turns the viewer cold in turn.

In the first film, Bridget's voice, ripe with paranoia the facts didn't confirm, offered both confidence and humility to those who might identify with her -- the imperfect seductress, defier of the Cosmopolitan ideal. Renée Zellweger, in skirts too short and underpants too wide, was a blunderer who knew better, but just couldn't find her footing. This was a woman who knew how to obsess without giving in to compulsion: she embraced her missteps, owned her sexuality, and made inadequate irresistible.

On the surface, Bridget Jones: the Edge of Reason, looks more or less like more of the same. But only on the surface. Still inexplicably the darling of both the impossibly perfect Mark Darcy (Colin Firth, more uprightly accepting than the human mind can conceive) and the temptingly imperfect Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant, more despicably enticing than the first film imagined), Zellweger's plumptress lacks the second time around both the charm and the cuteness that would even start to justify the attention. Beeban Kidron, taking over the directorial reins from Sharon Maguire, has no feel for the fun of it. She seems to believe Bridget's most doubting inner voice -- and so gives in to it -- losing the lovely distinction between what Bridget sees and what we do, making them one in the same. The diarist's narrative is lost -- the only view is the camera's view, and it isn't pretty. Through Kidron's lens, Bridget looks as ugly as she fears herself, vulnerable because she is stupid, rather than trusting. Not even zaftig in this revisiting (blubbery seems more like it, from the way she is shot), and as badly dressed as ever (nothing fits or is cut to form), Bridget Jones Returns stands as the role model for women around the universe who believe themselves to have no redeeming qualities, and who are right.  

The plot is sparse and farcical -- beginning with the happy union of Bridget, still a television reporter, and Darcy, still a human rights lawyer, and moving on to the hundred ways that Bridget can turn Darcy off and away: she interrupts one meeting of important internationals after another, climbs on his roof, falls into his garden, makes his table lose the trivia game at the Law Council dinner, and accuses him of cheating on her every chance she gets (his tolerance of her idiocies is the sort of noblesse oblige of the supercilious, and hardly the stuff of the first film's kiss in the snow -- it makes him less appealing, rather than more). She taunts reason and tests the patience of patience, so that by the time she gets to Thailand to film a television segment with Darcy rival and cad-on-the-beat Cleaver, we expect nothing but the worst from her (and, alas, the film). And we get it, with a Brokedown Palace ripoff. Who knew a comical Madonna riff in a Thai prison could seem in such poor taste? Perhaps it isn't all Kidron's fault, or even the fault of Fielding's co-screenwriters Andrew Davies, Richard Curtis and Adam Brooks; Fielding had done damage to Bridget herself in her own Thai-laced literary sequel.

And yet, as we watch, a giggle, nonetheless, may escape with the groan.  

Disappointing from a thousand angles, in the end, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason still manages to be a bit like its titular heroine; it persuades us it's not as bad as it clearly is. Like Bridget, it grabs hold of the hopefulness inside of us. Listening to Darcy and Cleaver say infinite numbers of blessedly well-scripted manly reassurances, a part of us (the part that controls the rom-com viewer within) shouts out "To hell with self-awareness and owning our identities." If all it takes to get gorgeous men with British accents and lots of money to fight over you (twice) is to dress badly and be unsure where Germany is, count me in. Seriously -- what woman wouldn't give up her thong for granny-pants if it might mean a weekend with Daniel Cleaver? And who wouldn't opt to look like a lemon-meringue sausage with Santa Claus cheeks if it might mean a lifetime with Mark Darcy?

Anyone?

©2004 Shari L. Rosenblum
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