Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy
Deftly balancing its light-hearted rom-com elements with a genuinely moving and poignant exploration of grief and what it means to ‘move on’ after a bereavement, this is a fantastic conclusion to the Bridget Jones series.
Premise: Four years after the sudden death of her husband, Mark Darcy (Colin Firth), Bridget Jones (Renée Zellweger) is determined to start ‘living, not just surviving’. Her friends – including former flame, now aging Lothario, Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant) – help her juggle her responsibilities as mother to two young children while she returns to work … and the dating scene.
Review:
I’ll happily hold my hands up and say … I was not expecting much from this movie. Although I was a huge fan of the original Bridget Jones's Diary in 2001, I also thought that its immediate sequel, 2004’s Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, was a fairly shameless cash-in that simply tried to rehash and reheat the same story again. Worst of all, I felt that it shortchanged Bridget Jones as a character by allowing her to fall for the charms of Hugh Grant’s Daniel Cleaver again after he’d already been exposed as a ‘love-rat’ in the first film.
But then 2016’s Bridget Jones’s Baby was a return to form for the series, because it managed to give Bridget not only a lot of character development (both in her professional life, and because she was no longer looking for a man to give her life meaning), but also a happily-ever-after ending when she finally married the love of her life, Colin Firth’s Mark Darcy, and they headed off into the sunset together to raise their new baby.
“…a funny & entertaining rom-com, but with moments of truthfulness that moved me to tears…”
So when Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy was first announced, I was dubious about whether we needed another instalment in the series – and then when it was announced that the plot would involve killing off Mark Darcy, it felt like a cheap gimmick to re-set Bridget’s character back into ‘hapless dating mode’. However, I’m happy to confirm that I could not have been more wrong – rather than being a cheap gimmick, the decision to explore what it means to try to ‘move on’ (whatever that means) after you lose the love of your life is precisely why we need this film.
Mad About the Boy is still a funny, light-hearted and entertaining rom-com (it certainly isn’t a ‘weepy’ melodrama by any stretch of the imagination) – but it also doesn’t shy away from the grief that Bridget Jones (Renée Zellweger) and her two children are struggling to live with. The fact that many audience members (myself included) have had these characters in our lives for the last 24 years adds an extra dimension to the poignancy of watching Bridget deal with what it’s like to face the rest of your life without the person you thought you’d grow old with. I don’t know how this movie might play for younger audience members who haven’t grown up with these films, but I don’t mind saying that although there were plenty of moments in this film that made me laugh, what really stuck with me once the credits rolled were the moments of truthfulness that moved me to tears.
“…Renée Zellweger is fantastic…”
Renée Zellweger is fantastic in this movie – it’s no easy task to balance the tonal shifts from moment to moment, but Renée Zellweger brings hope and lightness to the moments of feel-good comedy and heartfelt emotion and pathos to the moments of sadness and longing. Bringing back so many of the supporting characters from the earlier films – including Sally Phillips, James Callis and Shirley Henderson as Bridget’s longtime friends, Gemma Jones and Jim Broadbent as her parents, Sarah Solemani, Neil Pearson and Joanna Scanlan as her work colleagues, and even Emma Thompson as her gynaecologist – also adds to the film’s emotional impact.
Another wonderful surprise in Mad About the Boy is that it gives Hugh Grant a meaningful character arc as Daniel Cleaver. At the time, I felt that the decision to leave Daniel Cleaver out of Bridget Jones’s Baby was the right one, especially after bringing his character back for The Edge of Reason was one of the main problems I had with that film. I still think that was the right decision (having Daniel Cleaver in Bridget Jones’s Baby would have resulted in too many plot threads for that film), but in Mad About the Boy, Daniel Cleaver has matured and now has a truly touching friendship and bond with Bridget Jones, that was a delight to see.
“…an uplifting movie which offers hope…”
In terms of the new characters, the main ones are Leo Woodall’s Roxster – a confident potential love interest for Bridget who’s more than 20 years her junior – and Chiwetel Ejiofor’s Mr Walliker – a teacher at Bridget’s children’s school who tries to help when he sees Bridget’s son becoming more and more withdrawn. Leila Farzad also joins the cast as the queen of the school gates, and Josette Simon plays a mature TV presenter who joins Bridget’s circle of friends. Bizarrely, Isla Fisher appears in one short scene as Bridget’s neighbour, suggesting that a whole subplot involving her character probably ended up on the cutting room floor.
But ultimately, although this is still a rom-com, it’s not about Bridget’s search for love and romance as much as it is about the fact that she’s willing to try again after such an unimaginable loss. The film never tries to diminish what Bridget and Mark had, but at the same time, it’s also an uplifting movie which offers hope that happiness can find a way to exist alongside grief.
