Bridget back with unexpected pregnancy – Zellweger gives appealingly warm performance

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LONDON, Sept 6, (RTRS): Oscar winner Renee Zellweger puts on her British accent again to play bumbling Londoner Bridget Jones in the third instalment of the film franchise, with the much-loved character, now in her 40s, single again but unexpectedly pregnant.

The Texas-born actress reprises the role of the weight and love-obsessed character for “Bridget Jones’ Baby”, with Colin Firth back as the reserved Mark Darcy and new addition “Grey’s Anatomy” actor Patrick Dempsey as her love interests.

Zellweger first took on the role in 2001’s “Bridget Jones’ Diary” and “Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason” in 2004, both based on the 1990s novels by Helen Fielding.

While now older and working as a television news producer, Jones, described by Zellweger as “a character that I love”, still gets up to plenty of mishaps.

“She’s familiar to me”, Zellweger told Reuters in an interview. “But it was a different kind of experience creatively to figure out how you show that a person has evolved but at the same time not betray the essence of who they are”.

The movie begins with Jones turning 43 and single following her break up with long-term love interest Darcy.

But after an encounter with him as well as meeting American Jack Qwant, played by Dempsey, Jones becomes pregnant and is uncertain who the baby’s father is.

“She’s less naive, I think, which is great that both of her … suitors are great guys so it’s a different sort of rivalry because I think she would be less apt to fall for the silly guy at this stage in her life”, Zellweger said.

The movie has been highly-anticipated by fans, who were left shocked with 2013’s “Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy” book in which Fielding killed off Darcy and portrayed Jones a widowed mother with a toy boy.

Pressure

“From when we started production I’ve been very nervous about the pressure for it to succeed and whether it would be funny and whether it would work and whether she’s still relevant”, director Sharon Maguire told Reuters.

“But I think … there’s an enduring love for this character”.

Asked if she would be open to taking Jones’ story further forward, Fielding, also a screenwriter for the movie, told Reuters at the film’s Monday premiere: “I would never say never”.

“It has to have integrity so I would only write a Bridget story if I had a story to tell and something important to say”.

Firth added his interest in making another film should the opportunity arise, saying: “If I’m invited, yes”.

“A certain generation is growing up with her (Jones) and some are just discovering her and it will be interesting to see what at the very end will be the legacy of all that”, Dempsey added.

Still, it’s a pleasant enough change from the irrational, wildly overwritten jealousy that drove the plot of 2004’s largely woeful second film, “Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason”. Brand awareness and the nostalgia value of the franchise returning after a decade-plus gestation period should translate to a healthy delivery for the godparents of this “Baby”, Universal and Working Title.

Indeed, Bridget is back … and this time she’s eating for two! Actually, despite the fact that the central dilemma of the film relates to pregnancy, weight gain is not something Helen Fielding, Dan Mazer and Emma Thompson’s script for this third installment chooses to overly dwell on; they’ve sensibly intuited that both Bridget in particular and humanity in general need to move gracefully on from a calorie-counting fixation that now feels a bit ’90s. It’s up for debate whether graduating from an obsession with thigh circumference to a focus on an “accidental” pregnancy in which the mother doesn’t consult either of the potential fathers in advance really represents the zenith of progress for female representation in cinema. Still, at least the behavior of the main players feels, for the most part, recognizably human.

Version

Opening with a call-back to the beginning of 2001’s smash “Bridget Jones’ Diary”, we find Bridget sitting in the same apartment in a now gentrified Borough Market. She’s wearing the same red flannel PJs with unhip penguin design. She is, once more, singing along solo to “All By Myself”. However, unlike the Bridget of yore, who leaned into the sadness and mimed the entire song, this older version, who has just turned 43, determinedly changes the song to House of Pain’s “Jump Around” and proceeds to do just that, lip-syncing and bouncing on the bed. It’s one of those private, deeply uncool moments that cinema tends not to show us are enacted just as much by middle-aged women as by teenagers, and it’s nicely played by Zellweger.

Alas, despite Zellweger’s appealingly warm, vulnerable performance, the film itself is a mixed bag. Zesty and really rather good one-liners skewering such modern cultural phenomena as “glamping” (“calling him Gladolf Hitler wouldn’t suddenly make us forget all the unpleasantness”) sit alongside limper offerings such as the stale observation that people now put pictures of their lunch on Instagram. The assumption seems to be that a mere reference to something as newfangled as the photo- and video-sharing app will pass for a gag in and of itself, which, to be fair, is an optimistic assumption shared by plenty of writers.

Indeed, the sequel is caught in something of a bind as far as the zeitgeist is concerned. The audience is interested in this quintessentially turn-of-the-century character for nostalgic reasons: Should the filmmakers attempt to service fond memories or opt to update with modern dilemmas? “Bridget Jones’ Baby” aims to do both, resulting in something of an identity crisis — encapsulated neatly in the contrasts of a jukebox soundtrack that lurches from karaoke classics of the sort featured in the first film (“We Are Family”, “Ain’t No Stopping Us Now”, “Walk on By”).

It is not a huge surprise that the highs of the original film, which so perfectly captured a moment in pop culture, are difficult to replicate. Hugh Grant’s absence as caddish Daniel Cleaver is certainly felt, though it also results in a fun sight gag where half of the Eastern European-model population of London has gathered for a Daniel-centric rendezvous. Efforts to catching up fleetingly with the now smugly married gang of former singletons feel perfunctory (a pity given the caliber of comedic talent involved here), while the screen time devoted to the world of Bridget’s parents feels similarly truncated, despite the film’s two-hour run time; the edit was perhaps not an easy one.

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