It may sound like faint praise to declare the fourth Bridget Jones flick easily the best in the cycle. After all, the second chapter, The Edge of Reason, was as bad a film as we’ve seen this century.
No such disguised slight is intended. Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy offers irresistible evidence that there is still life in the school of middle-class English romcom that, with the invaluable assistance of Hugh Grant, the Working Title production company perfected in the premillennial years.
Sure, there is a degree of lifestyle porn here. Of all the things that concern the middle-aged Jonesy, few of them have to do with money. Her house is big. Returning to work is an act of self-care. But Mad About the Boy says things worth hearing about grief and the realities of ageing. It is hard to imagine how the series could have more satisfactorily been continued (or ended?).
A long precredit sequence establishes the successful balance between anguish and autumnal humour. In the years since the lively Bridget Jones’s Baby, Mark Darcy, Bridget’s long-pursued husband, has died and she has been left to raise two children in leafy north London.
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Like the antagonists of so many long-running sitcoms (and Tom from Tom & Jerry, for that matter), Grant’s once Machiavellian Daniel Cleaver has been largely rehabilitated and now acts as babysitter when Bridget attends a dinner commemorating Darcy’s death. Colin Firth, as the late spouse, accompanies her on the walk to her pals’ and then vanishes when the door opens.
We get a deal of debate. We learn that her son had not quite adjusted. There is a good gag referencing the first film’s famous opening credits. She opens her diary and, turning to the last entry – “Mark Gone” – raises pen with furry top.
That image is to Bridget Jones as James Bond swivelling and firing down the barrel is to the 007 franchise, but, though the film certainly honours its predecessors, the latest episode marks the biggest shift in tone so far.
Okay, that is still not such a great leap. Mad About the Boy has no car chases or Bergmanesque meditations on eternity. But Michael Morris, director of the Oscar-nominated To Leslie, and his screenwriters – the experienced Dan Mazer and Abi Morgan join Helen Fielding in adapting her 2013 book – have filleted out some of the more irritating quirks to allow space for something like raw emotion to flourish.
We, thank heavens, get less of the tiresome, cackling friends. (No harm to the good actors among their number.) Bridget is not asked to fall over quite so often. Renée Zellweger, whose English accent seems to have poshed up a few notches, appears visibly pressed down as Bridget potters back to work, deals with difficulties at her kids’ school and, eventually, hooks up with a man more than 20 years her junior (the likable Leo Woodall from One Day).
If that sounds too obvious an excuse for too familiar comedy, be comforted in the knowledge that, in the journey from book to page, the relationship has been edited down to more of an extended dalliance than a core plot. The important turns in her psychological re-evaluation will be navigated in the company of Chiwetel Ejiofor’s initially buttoned-up science teacher.
If the film has a flaw (and it probably doesn’t) it may lie in the lack of any obvious antagonist. Daniel is now a beloved old rogue whose sexist quips are delivered within heavy inverted commas. Neither Woodall nor Ejiofor is asked to be anything worse than, respectively, fearful of commitment or hardened in his thinking.
So what? Mad About the Boy may take place in the safest of all worlds, but it is more connected to the greater sadnesses of life than we had any right to expect. Oh, and it’s still properly funny. Which matters a bit.
In cinemas from Thursday, February 13th
