Boy Trouble
Our girl Bridget Jones has turned 50. Like you’d know it.
Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy
Director: Michael Morris • Writers: Helen Fielding, Dan Mazer, Abi Morgan, based on the book by Helen Fielding
Starring: Renée Zellweger, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Leo Woodall, Hugh Grant
UK / France / USA • 2hrs 5mins
Opens Hong Kong Feb 13 • IIB
Grade: C-
What on earth is going on in Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy? I’ll admit to feel out of step with some elements of popular culture. I’m not getting the hoo-hoo over Sabrina Carpenter or, frankly, MIRROR, but rarely has a piece of culture felt so out of step with the world as Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy does. The first time we got a taste of Renée Zellweger’s adorably klutzy early-thirties career gal Bridget just trying to find the right guy was going on 25 years ago, and Bridget Jones as a cultural thing dates to 1996, when Helen Fielding’s first book came out. Admittedly there are multiple scenarios at play: 1) I’ve changed. Fair, everyone does. 2) Bridget Jones, as played by Renée Zellweger, has changed, and it’s not quite the same character we met in 2001. 3) The world has changed, so Bridget Jones looks and feels like a relic of the ’90s that hasn’t come all the way into the 21st century with the rest of us.
My guess is it’s a combination of the three, but more than anything the “adorable” antics of past films just aren’t that charming anymore. When we pick up with Bridget, she’s an early-fifties widow. It seems her lawyer husband Mark Darcy (Colin Firth) was killed on a humanitarian mission in Sudan four years ago, and now Bridget is raising nine-year-old Billy – yes, from the very end of Bridget Jones’s Baby – and four-year-old Mabel (Mila Jankovic and Casper Knopf) on her own, a stay-at-home mom who occasionally gets babysitting help from perpetual dawg Daniel (Hugh Grant). After some encouragement from usual friends (Sally Phillips and James Callis), her doctor (Emma Thompson) and former colleague Miranda the news anchor (Sarah Solemani), Bridget joins Tinder and juvenile hilarity ensues as she starts playing the dating game with the much younger Roxster (White Lotus’s Leo Woodall), who’s into her for… reasons, and what appears to be the only teacher at her kids’ school, Mr Wallaker (Chiwetel Ejiofor).
That expression is just the start
It’s alarming how intensely Mad About the Boy confuses cutesy with stupidity. No one puts dry pasta in a pot with a splash of water to cook. No adult is going to get “stuck” in a tree a metre up the trunk. No 50-year-old woman who came of age in the age of AIDS is clueless about how to buy condoms. No one who took time off from full time work would show up at a job interview in a shite outfit with rat’s nest hair. Ha ha ha, Bridget is bad at fashion. Fuck off.
Yes, silliness that demonstrates the main character’s propensity for getting themselves into “wacky” situations is Rom-com 101, and Mad About the Boy adheres to some of its fine traditions – this one even has the same snowy finale as Bridget Jones’s Diary – but in steering away from convention just a bit new director Michael Morris and his writers dilute the rom-com energy fans of the form enjoy. Bridget isn’t stuck between the Wrong One and the Right One this time; she tries the Wrong One, ends it, and then moves on to the Right One (an insulting afterthought if you ask me). It saps the movie of romantic and sexual tension, and though Morris has done some astute work in TV (notably on Better Call Saul and Halt and Catch Fire) he and Zellweger have transformed Bridget into a village idiot. Zellweger’s accent is as pitch perfect as ever, but her endless mugging, squinting, puckering and Frankenstein’s monster physicality result in a baffling, objectively terrible performance. If any of us saw someone walking the streets of Central the way Bridget does here you’d clear a wide berth at the very least, or possibly call an ambulance.
When you squint as hard as Zellweger you can see what Morris is going for in Mad About the Boy, which was based on Fielding’s third book. The idea is to turn a mature, possibly jaded, eye towards Bridget’s middle-aged parenting, work, self-esteem, love and mortality anxieties, especially for women, and the constructed competition women have been convinced exists among them. Bridget frets over the “other perfect moms” from school, and about getting naked in front of a man at her age. She also grapples with what it means to move on, which co-writers Fielding, Dan Mazer and Abi Morgan skim over ever so slightly in a barely there sub-plot centred on Will’s worries he’ll forget his father. All of it affirms the shift from rom-com to rom-dram. Because olds are serious.
Despite its general cringiness Mad About the Boy does have its moments: an old fashioned wet t-shirt moment when Roxster saves a dog is genuinely funny. Josette Simon as Talitha, the award-winning war correspondent reduced to morning show drudgery, Thompson and Grant, continuing his late-career crank gold (watching him teach 10-year-olds how to make a “Dirty Bitch” is everything) all steal every single scene they’re in. And a bit where Mr Wallaker peers through Bridget’s window on New Year’s Eve before running off I’d swear he thought “White people.” In the end this is a fairly unfunny film about a character learning to grow up and move on. It’s ironic the franchise can’t figure that out as well.