I was about 10 when I first watched Bridget Jones’ Diary. While its depiction of the ‘purgatory’ of being a 30-something-year-old single woman, counting calories, pounds and alcohol units, may have put the fear of God in me at that age, Bridget (Renee Zellweger) has remained an enduring icon in my all-female family.
Part of what makes her “our Bridget” is her relatability. For my mum watching the film in 2001, she was perhaps the first on-screen rom-com heroine who wasn’t a perfect “American stick-insect” (as Bridget says). Bridget was messy, and raw, and navigating life as a woman surrounded by people telling her that she just wasn’t quite good enough – a beacon in the sea of early 2000s/late ‘90s media, which was obsessed with depicting perfect women.
When I heard that the latest book in the Bridget Jones series was being adapted to the big screen, I honestly expected the worst. I wasn’t a fan of the last movie (Bridget Jones’ Baby) as it felt like a tired dragging-out of the series and didn’t capture the essence of Bridget for me. Going into the cinema, I thought I’d be watching something akin to Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again – a poor and inaccurate extension of the original movie, made as if the directors had never actually seen the original. But Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy (from here: Mad About the Boy) genuinely surprised me: it perfectly encapsulated everything that the Bridget Jones series represents, and might just be the best Bridget Jones sequel to date.
Mad About the Boy sees Bridget around 20 years after the first movie. She is in her fifties, and is raising two children. It takes place four years after the death of Mark Darcy (Colin Firth), the main love interest of the first three movies, and eventually her husband and the father of her children. The movie mirrors the plot of Bridget Jones’ Diary. It follows a year in Bridget’s life, ending with New Year’s Eve, and sees her develop an exciting romance with a much younger man, Roxster (One Day’s Leo Woodall), who isn’t quite right for her – much like her relationship with her boss, Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant), in the first film. She also has a lot of accidental encounters with her son’s science teacher, Mr Walliker (Chiwetel Ejiofor), whom she initially thinks is dull and cynical – sound familiar?
I was initially sceptical about the idea of Mark’s off-screen death – I don’t enjoy that trope in other movie sequels as it tends to feel like an underexplored plot point (and often obvious that it was decided because the actor was unavailable). But it makes sense here: Bridget Jones has to exist in a romantic comedy and frankly, after three installments of on-and-off Bridget, Mark and Daniel, the series definitely needed fresh romantic interests. In this way, the film also allows us to see a Bridget who ‘exists beyond’ Mark and Daniel.
However, the movie also brilliantly explores how Bridget and her children navigate their grief. Instead of beginning with New Year’s Eve like the previous movies, it uses Mark’s birthday as the main point around which to orient a year in Bridget’s life and functions as the climax of the movie. She picks her diary up again where she left off following Mark’s death – her last entry being titled “Mark gone.” Mark shows up frequently in the movie, as Bridget’s imagination recreates him during tear-jerking moments with their children. The climax of the movie also occurs not in the form of a dramatic kissing scene, but at the moment where Bridget accepts that “you can live at the same time as all the things you’ve lost, and you can be happy without them.”
In this sense, the movie loses the typical ‘rom-com’ feel that the other films have, but it makes up for it in hilarity. Bridget still has her awkward moments and her youngest daughter (Mila Jankovic) provides excellent comic relief: Mabel bringing a stack of syphilis leaflets to school had the whole cinema in stitches. The jokes play much less on Bridget embarrassing herself in this movie, though, as the writers rely on innuendos and absurdity for laughs instead. I found this quite relieving – the movie isn’t making fun of Bridget as a ‘lonely clueless spinster,’ and as an audience we’re laughing with her, not at her.
Mad About the Boy is also full of references to the other movies, which are perfectly interwoven into the screenplay – from Bridget’s penguin pajamas to her friends drinking their blue soup cocktails. Scenes often mirror classic episodes from Bridget’s life – such as the awkward dinner from the first movie, where Bridget is the only single person in a room full of couples giving her condescending advice. Zellweger perfectly recaptures Bridget’s mannerisms and expressions – Bridget hasn’t changed a bit, and neither have her friends.
But a welcome change from the other movies is that in Mad About the Boy, Bridget’s story doesn’t only revolve around her love life. We see her rejuvenating her love for her job in television and being genuinely brilliant in her career, forging new friendships and strengthening old ones, and embracing her motherhood. Bridget’s assertion that “what I have is what I love most” is an unprecedented turnaround from the other movies: Bridget accepts that it is okay to be a ‘singleton’ because her life is still so full of love, whether she bags the boy in the end or not.
Friendship is a constant theme in the movie, and is perhaps a more powerful force in Bridget’s life than her romantic endeavours. Her friends (and lovers) from each of the previous movies join together to support Bridget at a difficult time in her life, babysitting her children and taking her out for drinks. Bridget’s new friend Talitha (Josette Simon) particularly encapsulates this sense of strong bonds between older women who lift each other up, as she encourages Bridget that she can “adapt and survive like we all do.”
The biggest criticism of the original Bridget Jones movie tends to be the misogynistic undertones to much of the screenplay: Bridget’s obsession with her weight; her fixation on her appearance and singlehood; and not to mention the wildly inappropriate way that men objectifying women is played for laughs. But I think this grounds the movies in the real world – these are all things women in the 2000s were concerned about, and still are today. Bridget was perhaps the first rom-com heroine to represent this reality of the female experience.
Mad About the Boy grows with its audience in this respect – instead of her weight, Bridget is concerned with aging, motherhood, and whether she is still desirable. She has quit smoking and calorie counting. Now, instead of comparing herself to Mark’s female colleagues, she is worried about what the other mums on the playground think of her. The women who saw themselves in Bridget in 2001, are perhaps recognising themselves in her again, twenty-four years later.
The film balances these aspects of Bridget’s life, as an older single mother pursuing a career, with the excitement and sexiness of a typical romantic comedy. It shows that women who are in their fifties, who are mothers, who are struggling with grief and self-doubt can be the objects of romance and lust too. The sex scenes are more intimate and romantic than any of the previous movies (despite Bridget’s bed being full of her kids’ toys!)
I also liked that Bridget’s children have their own developed characters. Often, the children of main characters feel like afterthoughts just to show that they have had children, but Billy’s (Casper Knopf) silent struggle to understand his father’s passing is deeply moving, while Mabel is hilariously brazen. In this way, the complexities of Bridget’s life are fully fleshed out – her relationships truly do feel ‘lived in.’
Bridget’s old flame Daniel Cleaver shows up in the first 10 minutes of the movie, and while he is still as sleazy as ever, Grant gives a brilliant performance of Daniel as an older man, struggling with the many regrets he has about the choices he’s made in life. He is heartwarming as the ‘fun uncle’ figure to Bridget’s children, and his demonstration to Bridget’s son Billy of how to make a ‘dirty bitch’ cocktail had me cracking up. While he still flirts with Bridget, she is no longer swayed by him – instead this functions to show that Bridget is still desirable, even if she thinks she is not.
Of course, the film is very grounded in the 2020s – Bridget uses Tinder, she gets ‘ghosted,’ and her kids are obsessed with slime. This tends to give me the ‘ick’ in most movies, but Mad About the Boy perfectly blends these modern elements with the essence of the first movie to create the best installment in Bridget’s story to date. Grounding Bridget in the 2020s really works with this movie – it allows an audience to relate to her, which has always been key to the Bridget Jones series. The original was very much rooted in contemporary pop culture and technology, so why shouldn’t the sequels be the same?
Overall, I thought that Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy was a truly perfect sequel. It brilliantly combined the essence of the first movie and references to Bridget’s life with the relatability of grounding Bridget in the 2020s. The absurdity and hilarity of the Bridget Jones franchise has remained, as have the typical romantic aspects. But what is most striking are the underlying elements of grief, parenthood and self-doubt, interwoven into the plot to produce a refreshing new view of Bridget and everything that she represents.