Bridget Jones Might Be Mad About a Boy ...

Look I know, rising fascism, climate crisis, welfare cuts, war, billionaires mocking authors by stealing their work, deportations. I know. There is no need to get angry about a film.

It was a Saturday night. There was nothing on the telly. And we didn’t want to mindlessly stream. It was my suggestion that we give Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy a go. After all, we have watched the other episodes in the franchise. They might not be great works of art, but they were all well-crafted, performed and easy to watch. I apologise to my partner for the suggestion.

You see, the thing about the final instalment of Bridget Jones is that it is manipulative and dishonest from the start. Look, there’s Mr Darcy, the reliable, handsome Colin Firth – oh, but he’s dead. Are you ready to weep yet?

But I didn’t cry at any point during this movie, because I just didn’t buy into the world it was selling.

For those who don’t know the franchise, Bridget Jones is a character created by the novelist Helen Fielding and played by Renee Zellweger. She is loveable and slightly hopeless in love. She has big crushes and makes bad choices. She fails to recognise good fortune and gets herself into scrapes. But as with all good rom-coms, she ends up with the right guy regardless. Over the course of four films we have seen her move from the world of publishing into TV production, which was a natural fit for her offbeat personality and charm. We have seen her navigate falling in and out of love and back into love with Mark Darcy (played by Colin Firth), whilst occasionally messing up with bad boy Daniel Cleaver (played by Hugh Grant). But now she is 50 with two small children and widowed as her husband has been murdered in the line of his serious job, human rights lawyer.

We start this movie, with a re-establishment of Bridget’s ditzy, scatter-brained approach to life. She arrives on the school run still in her pyjamas. She is in competition with women who appear to have their lives together, while she flounders with her grief and lack of direction.

But this is a particularly cozy version of single-parenthood and grief. And it started making me angry.

Things it got wrong:

• London has traffic.
• Mr Darcy may have had wonderful life insurance, so that Bridget could continue to live in a house in the pretty suburb with a garden and ample-sized kitchen, but people who I know working in human rights would definitely struggle with that level of affluence (and Bridget doesn’t have a job and as far as I could tell hadn’t had one since her children were born).
• I have no idea what kind of school Bridget’s children attended, but a primary school with a teacher talking about Newton’s laws seems, well, unlikely.
• TV producers earn enough to pay for a full-time nanny, apparently. Not just any nanny – a particularly well-qualified one with years of experience and references and still only in her early twenties.
• Fifty year old girlfriends might well offer the full range of advice to their grieving friend but no-one sets them up on Tinder without their permission.
• Tinder is not a candy shop where Roxter (Leo Woodall), a twenty-something, caring environmentalist would seek out a much older woman. And no-one talked to Bridget about how to keep herself safe, when she’d been out of dating for so long
• It was decided that Bridget was in the final stages of the grieving cycle. As if, that is how grieving really works. But also it means that we missed out on the other more interesting dramatic stages of grieving, like anger and sadness.
• That is not how a children’s outward bounds adventure in the Lake District would look. There would be proper accommodation. The weather is too unpredictable amongst those huge peaks to take shelter in an abandoned barn.
• It would not be snowing in London at Christmas. It would be grey and rainy.
• And if by some miracle it was snowing, Bridget would need a coat. She couldn’t wait around for a love of my next chapter moment, in the snow, in a silk shirt.

All of that, and I was so annoyed by Bridget herself. Her uptight, cutesy little walk and her bumbling around while all the men just happened to fall in love with her. (Even though her best friend is the attractive Sally Phillips). This works in your twenties and thirties. In your fifties, your approach to romance needs to have evolved.

By the end I found myself getting annoyed with Renee Zellweger’s hair. Just tie it up properly or get a blow dry, I wanted to shout at the screen.

And that’s when I realised I was just watching a bad movie. Because I am not the sort of woman to judge another on the state of her hair.

So, yes there are more important things to expend my angry energy on. But I really wanted to escape from that for a couple of hours. And I was angry, because I knew it could be better. I wasn't asking for high art, just some authentic warmth.All that talent on the screen and behind it – it should have been good. It should definitely have been good enough to give me a few laughs and to forget about the state of the world. I didn’t laugh once. I didn’t cry at the manipulation. My heart wasn’t warmed. I didn’t care if she found love.

I just wanted it to end.

Of course my anger is really directed at the state of the world. But this film could've have given me some reprieve from all that and it failed.

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