‘Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy’ review: What if it’s great, but I hate it?
Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy is set to premiere on Peacock. With the long-awaited fourth entry in the misadventures of its eponymous heroine, fans and critics alike have to ask: Is there any way to recapture the rom-com perfection that was 2001’s Bridget Jones’s Diary?
Directed by Sharon Maguire, that magnificent movie adaptation of Helen Fielding’s cheeky modern spin on Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice not only boasted a classic love triangle but also the swoon-worthy trifecta of Renée Zellweger, Colin Firth, and Hugh Grant. Theirs was a (pre-Challengers) three-way chemistry so intoxicating that filmmakers gave it another go with 2004’s Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, trying desperately to recreate the crowd-pleasing moments from the first film, from daffy duels to winsome confessions of love. The result was a commercial success, but a critical flop. (And before you decide to revisit it, be warned it has aged like an abandoned banana.)
12 years would pass before Bridget Jones’s Baby, which re-teamed Maguire, Zellweger, and Firth. (Grant’s rakish Daniel Cleaver was temporarily killed off and swapped for a cocky, love-bombing American played by Patrick Dempsey.) While better reviewed and a box office success, the film series that followed Fielding’s books was challenging its audience to accept something counterintuitive to its rom-com classification: There’s no such thing as happily ever after.
Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy takes this idea even further, so brace yourself.
Despite that hot kiss on a cold winter night at the end of the first film, Bridget Jones (Zellweger) and Mark Darcy (Firth) broke up for a portion of the sequel. And at the start of the third movie, he was married to someone else entirely! So, what does that mean for Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy?
Well — as readers of Fielding’s novel know — Mark has died, and Bridget is a widowed mother of their two kids. So, this fourth installment moves even farther away from being the tale of Bridget and Mark’s love, and is more about a woman of wit and wild impulses finding happiness in spite of everything the world throws at her. Undoubtedly, there’s something beautiful about this, but fans who adore the first film’s hopefulness might be hit hard by this sequel’s blunt realities. I certainly was.
Directed by Michael Morris, this sequel begins four years after Mark Darcy died during a humanitarian trip to Sudan. In a charming house, Bridget Jones (aka Mrs. Darcy) raises her gentle son Billy (Casper Knopf) and headstrong daughter Mabel (Mila Jankovic), with occasional babysitting help from her rascally old friend Daniel Cleaver (a deliciously saucy Hugh Grant). However, without a husband, she is once more the pitying prey of smug married couples at a comically awkward dinner party, so feels pressured to get out into the dating world again.
A variety of pre-established friends pop up, bringing back dazzling supportingly players like Emma Thompson as wry gynecologist Dr. Rawlings, Celia Imrie as pesky Aunt Una, Gemma Jones as Bridget’s fretful mum, Sarah Solemani as sassy TV presenter Miranda, and Shirley Henderson, James Callis, and Sally Phillips as Bridget’s beloved besties Jude, Tom, and Shazzer. Everyone has advice for how Bridget should “move on,” ranging from going back to work in television to hooking up with the hot young man who helped her out of a tree.
With a name like a Sex and the City beau, Roxster McDuff (Leo Woodall) is in his late 20s and deeply enamored with Bridget. But it wouldn’t be a Bridget Jones movie without a romantic rival. Enter Mr. Wallaker (Chiwetel Ejiofor), Billy’s science teacher, whose brisk manner covers up a heart of gold. (Sound familiar?) But how is Bridget supposed to get caught up in a new love when everywhere she goes she still sees Mark (Firth, playing a memory)?
Jane Austen didn’t write sequels, so Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy’s love was assumed to last without incident ever since Pride & Prejudice’s publishing in 1813. Fielding wasn’t about to put her beloved re-invented heroine on a shelf, so found fresh obstacles and romantic thrills for Bridget Jones across four books. Maybe there was a financial motivation here. But of all the movie’s sequels that have come from Fielding’s book series, Mad About the Boy is the most profound. It doesn’t feel like just another go with Bridget and her boys. It pushes her to grow in meaningful ways outside of her wacky shenanigans.
Don’t mistake me. Bridget will still find ways to embarrass herself in front of a crowd, be it verbal explosions or an ill-advised beauty treatment. Yet to the credit of screenwriters Helen Fielding, Dan Mazer, and Abi Morgan, the grief over a partner’s loss isn’t swept under the rug, as if it’s easy to keep calm and carry on. Instead, Bridget will carry on with cheek!
While Bridget doesn’t weep, you will as she imagines Mark tucking their kids into bed with a smile and a song, or in her voiceover shares the ache of his absence. And to double down, her dear old dad (Jim Broadbent) has passed too, leaving her little protection against her mother’s well-meaning but intense intrusions. On top of that, Bridget must parent her young son through the grief, as he wonders how faith in an afterlife fits into the life-cycle lessons he’s getting at school. This sparks moments of outrage, softened by Zellweger’s expert comedic performance. With all this loss and mourning — even amid the humor and sexual frolics — my face was awash with tears as I watched this movie. And it’s left me torn.
Before you cue this up for Galentine’s Day or Valentine’s Day, know that it’s not like its predecessors in one major way. Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy is not an unabashedly feel-good movie. In the original, a low point for Bridget was singing “All By Myself” in a melodramatic moment of self-pity. Things get much lower here. While there are a slew of callbacks to the first film, from characters to comedy bits to costumes, it’s not a cozy retread like the previous sequels. Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy offers comedy and romance, but also delves so deeply into grief that it’s not a breezy watch. And honestly, I admire that.
Grief is as certain as death and taxes, and yet Western society struggles with how to talk about it. That Fielding made Bridget the face of such loss is brilliant. There’s an inherent lunacy in grief, where you can feel mad that the world carries on while yours has fallen apart. And who better to show us a path forward than the woman who’s been mad in love and mad in heartache and mad in blue-soup making? There’s a sense that if Bridget can make her way through the muck of mourning, then so too can we. And that is wonderful, even if it means this film series no longer strives to be feel-good.
Even as the movie meanders to an indulgent runtime of two hours and four minutes, the filmmakers litter the path with treasures. Some of them are tearful, whether it’s Bridget wishing for her lover or her father. Some are joyful, like Bridget playing with the children she pined for so intensely in the previous sequels. Some are salacious and silly, like an inspired set piece in which Roxster recreates Firth’s wet shirt scene from the Pride & Prejudice miniseries. (IYKYK).
And yet, there’s a part of me that resisted the film, because I’m not ready to let go of Mark Darcy. Re-imagined as a dream man for a new millennium, he made a generation of women feel seen when he told Bridget, “I like you just the way you are.” He was a beacon of hope in a sea of bad men. And there’s so much loss in the real world, why take him away from us? Honestly, I resented Mad About the Boy as I watched it, not only because of my anger at the death of this fictional character, but also because Bridget’s journey hit home, forcing me to recall viscerally the real-life losses I’ve endured. And while she was able to neatly — even charmingly – process this over the course of this movie, I still feel mad about the loss. So, I was not ready for Mad About the Boy.
As a critic, I strive to have an elastic empathy that might allow me to appreciate a movie, even when it’s not “for me.” And though I loved the first Bridget Jones so deeply that I still know much of it by heart, this sequel is not for me. Not yet. My pain is still too raw to take comfort in Bridget’s latest diary entries. But I can recognize that. I must give credit that Fielding understood that through the loss of Mark, Bridget has more to give. She has been a wacky role model of self love. And by following her next chapter, we’re offered a friend through some of life’s ugliest moments. Just as she has handled disasters far less dire, she’ll do it with a signature smile and a bit of wit.
Which is all to say that Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy is the best sequel of the batch. It’s joyful, seeded with Easter eggs, and radiant with Zellweger back in full effect, but it’s also a tearjerker that might well knock the wind out of you.