‘Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy’ Review: Renée Zellweger Shines in Poignant Moments of Closing Chapter Flush With Fan-Service
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It’s been almost a quarter-century since Renée Zellweger first stepped into the shoes of the wine-guzzling, smoking, babbling, pratfall-prone and terminally awkward title character in Bridget Jones’s Diary. Over the course of four movies, the erstwhile singleton, forever sorting out complicated romantic entanglements and riddled with self-doubt, has become a virtual compendium of tics and mannerisms and cutesy eccentricities — not unlike an actress-character fusion of comparable vintage, Sarah Jessica Parker and Carrie Bradshaw. But the symbiosis between Zellweger and Bridget has an idiosyncratic charm that’s undeniable, which buoys this fourth chapter through patches of strained comedy and formulaic plotting.
What really distinguishes Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, however, is the depth of feeling it brings to the protagonist’s grief and her gradual emergence from it. That goes double for Zellweger’s performance. In a franchise where happy endings are a contractual requirement, it can hardly be considered a spoiler to call the movie comfort-food therapy, showing how even the most devastating loss can make way for the unexpected joy and fulfillment of a reset.
Directed by Michael Morris, a television veteran who moved into features with the Andrea Riseborough vehicle To Leslie, Mad About the Boy is often sluggish and occasionally flat, lacking in rhythm in ways that the poppy needle drops can only do so much to disguise. But the inbuilt affection audiences have for the character will no doubt make the Universal release huge in the U.K. and a strong draw in the U.S. on Peacock, where it will stream exclusively. Fans will eat up the heady rush of emotional uplift in the tearjerking final act.
The screenplay by series author Helen Fielding, Dan Mazer and Abi Morgan lays its foundation in sorrow, jumping forward to several years after the events of the third installment, Bridget Jones’s Baby. After finally loosening up emotionally constipated Mark Darcy (Colin Firth) enough to marry him, Bridget is still struggling four years after he was killed while on a humanitarian mission in Sudan. Mark’s presence remains so vivid she still sees him.
Their adorable six-year-old daughter Mabel (Mila Jankovic) was too young to remember her father well, but she nonetheless asks every man she encounters if he’s going to be her new daddy, while her brother Billy (Casper Knopf), now 10, is a smart, somewhat withdrawn kid, touched by sadness.
In a funny throwback to the series’ roots, Bridget’s former boss and lover, Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant), previously presumed dead in a plane crash but now very much alive, is back as a dear friend, albeit still an outrageous flirt. The rakish womanizer has mellowed with age only insofar as he’s graduated from dating 20ish models to a 20ish poet, healer and model.
Grant, who scores many of the script’s best lines, brings a shot of mischievous vitality every time he’s onscreen, as well as some poignant commentary on mortality and lasting connection during a sobering juncture for Daniel. The actor’s career renaissance of the past decade has made him a value-added bonus to pretty much any project in which he appears. OK, maybe not as an Oompa-Loompa in the mystifyingly successful Wonka, but Heretic made up for it.
Having established an underlay of grief, the writers put aside the melancholy and return to the template, signaled by Bridget waking up and exuberantly lip-synching to David Bowie’s “Modern Love” while getting the kids ready for school.
As usual, everyone insists that what Bridget needs is to get laid. That includes her core friend group Shazzer (Sally Phillips), now a podcaster; Tom (James Callis), a life coach; and Jude (Shirley Henderson), a corporate high achiever who warns her, “If you don’t do it soon, your vagina will heal over.”
Echoing the sexual healing gospel are Bridget’s former work colleague Miranda (Sarah Solemani) and the latter’s regal co-host on a daytime TV show for women, Talitha (Josette Simon). Miranda takes the initiative of setting up Bridget on Tinder, tagging her page, “Tragic Widow Seeks Sexual Awakening.”
Cue the franchise staple of two potential love interests, both of whom converge when Bridget and her children are stuck up a tree on Hampstead Heath. One is Billy’s decidedly left-brained science teacher, Mr. Walliker (Chiwetel Ejiofor); the other is a much younger biochemistry student who works part-time as a park ranger, known as Roxster (Leo Woodall).
A sexy bad boy on season two of The White Lotus, Woodall is more of a prince charming here, upping the energy with the 29-year-old character’s warmth and spontaneity and seeming absence of hang-ups about the age gap between him and Bridget. At least at first. A terrific scene set to Dinah Washington’s recording of the Noël Coward song that gives the film its title has him making a heroic entrance at Talitha’s birthday party, causing the assembled guests to swoon before locking Bridget in a knee-trembling kiss.
But having set Roxster up as the main event, the writers don’t know what to do with him, giving the character short shrift by reducing him to a stepping-stone. That makes the movie’s title misleading, since “the boy” is swiftly sidelined. But it paves the way for the steady build of Bridget’s chemistry with Mr. Walliker, who refreshingly comes around to her way of thinking about life more than she comes around to his.
That shift is set in motion during a school excursion to the Lake District on which Bridget is a volunteer parent supervisor. You might question whether a busload of present-day 10-year-olds would be enthusiastically singing along to the Clash’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go,” but no less than its predecessors, this is a rom-com fantasy, so if it makes sense for Bridget, it makes sense for the movie.
Ejiofor is a wonderful addition, his character’s gentle manner, sensitivity and intelligence putting the movie on a more real-world footing that enhances the emotional payoff. This also allows Zellweger’s performance to get beyond Bridget’s exaggerated quirks and find depth in the yearning that has partly defined the character from the start — without making her an anti-feminist dinosaur, incomplete without a man.
I’ll confess I found a lot of the character’s traditional shtick a tad stale — the questioning head tilt with every interior monologue, the self-conscious gait, some belabored physical comedy with a recalcitrant zipper, the prevailing chaos involved in Bridget’s negotiation of most tasks. But Zellweger wears Bridget like a comfy pair of grandma knickers and her foibles have become endearing. The actress is especially good here at building from the underpinning of sorrow as Bridget slowly comes to realize that her life is not over, and happiness might still be within reach.
Adding to the emotional fullness of this fourth and final — though never say never — chapter is a late scene incorporating a song from the beloved Brit musical Oliver! It’s a shamelessly sentimental assault on the tear ducts that only the most hard-hearted will resist.
It could be argued that not all the new characters have much of a narrative function — though Nico Parker is lovely as Chloe, the kids’ hyper-efficient nanny — and that some returning characters seem hurriedly shoehorned in for the sake of fan service, notably Bridget’s parents (Gemma Jones and Jim Broadbent) and her mother’s friend Una (Celia Imrie).
The chief exception is Emma Thompson, in crisply humorous form as Dr. Rawlings, the gynecologist with whom Bridget insists on making appointments for whatever is troubling her. Like Grant, Thompson is a pro who gets maximum mileage from limited screen time and brings out the best in Zellweger.
While the movie has no distinctive visual stamp, it honors the Richard Curtis model in giving the London locations a picturesque gloss. It’s a place that anyone with a fondness for this enduring series will happily revisit, their nostalgia rewarded by images and clips from across the four films accompanying the end credits.