"Bridget Jones's Diary"

A smarted-up, tarted-up take on a book about a girl who unapologetically enjoys sex.

By Stephanie Zacharek

Apr 13, 2001 | "Bridget Jones's Diary," director Sharon Maguire's adaptation of the hugely successful Helen Fielding novel, isn't nearly the movie it should be. But a film's tone is much harder to get right than its shape: Think of the difference between a straightforward royal blue and a dusty periwinkle that's exactly the shade of that one elusive stripe of a certain sunset sky. In that sense, "Bridget Jones's Diary," despite its miscues and patches of wayward perambulating, wins the bigger battle. It strikes just the right tone, and in the recent universe of airlessly cheery romantic comedies like "Someone Like You" and "What Women Want," that's no small thing.

"Bridget Jones" makes a better movie than it does a novel. Fielding herself helped adapt it; Andrew Davies and Richard Curtis, the latter of whom wrote "Four Weddings and a Funeral" and "Notting Hill," are her co-writers. Fielding's novel, a story loosely molded on Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice" and begun as a series of columns in the British newspaper the Independent, recounted the misadventures of a London single woman in her early 30s, a goodhearted, overweight, insecure, bumbling and desperate-to-be-attached Everywoman.

The problem was that the Bridget Jones of Fielding's novel wasn't so much a character as a miniskirted confluence of every stock insecurity that single women nearing the end of their baby-making years are alleged to feel. Fielding seemed to be working under the assumption that if you jab enough humor (of any kind) at your own self-pity, you'll come up with something noble. The result was often amusing, but ultimately just as annoyingly handwringing as an old "Cathy" comic strip or a Wendy Wasserstein play, running on the fumes of an supposedly self-effacing laugh track with a simpering whine attached: "C'mon, guys, we chubby single girls are really nice people!"

"Bridget Jones" the movie is a recognizable version of the book; it's simply a much smarter one. Fielding, Davies and Curtis had the good sense to downplay the novel's cutesiest and most annoying elements -- the obsessively endless references to Bridget's calorie counting, for instance, and the book's trademark but gimmicky use of Bridgetisms like "v. v. good" (which became even more annoying as reviewer after reviewer struck upon the oh-so-original idea of adopting them as well).

The film preserves one significant and enjoyable element from the book: It's clear Bridget is a girl who unapologetically enjoys sex. We first meet Bridget (Renée Zellweger) as she arrives at her family's Christmas party; her mother (Gemma Jones) is eager to match her up with handsome, single barrister Mark Darcy (Colin Firth). Even aside from the fact that he's wearing a hideous reindeer sweater (a pitch-perfect match for the sculpted-velvet carpetbag vest-and-skirt combo Bridget's mother has forced her to wear), he strikes Bridget as arrogant and rude. She returns to her P.R. job at a London publishing firm, anxious to forget about the swine, only to find that he shows up at practically every work and social engagement she happens to attend, usually with a snooty, grasshopper-thin fellow barrister named Natasha (Embeth Davidtz).

Bridget's office is the kind of place that's peppered with sourly conservative workmates and leering superiors like the one named Mr. Fitzherbert. (Bridget calls him Mr. Titspervert.) But she can't help tumbling into a torrid affair with her devilishly boyish boss, Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant), who just happens to be Darcy's nemesis from some past romantic triangle.

Meanwhile, Bridget goes about the business of being single and feeling increasingly uncomfortable with that fact; she makes the occasional reference to wanting to lose that 20 pounds, quit smoking and, of course, find a nice, steady boyfriend. The script, unlike the book, doesn't hammer those points into you like so many torturesome thumbtacks. Maybe that's partly because Zellweger is so at home in the character of Bridget that she doesn't need them.

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