In the midst of the hellscape that we live in – wildfires in the winter, multiple viruses rampant because public health is dead, anticipation of an American invasion, more tariff talk – I decided to soothe myself with the latest installment of the Bridget Jones franchise.
This movie, which I feared would be terrible, is also one of the few things that I have been looking forward to for the last few months.
I vividly remember watching Bridget Jones’s Diary, which was aspirational because of its glamorous depiction of second wave feminism. I was in high school when it came out. I considered myself a feminist even though my feminism was about as shallow as Bridget’s. My habits of consumption marked me out as an aspirational member of the lower middle classes. I was a member of the target audience.
I loved Bridget because she was hilarious and messy in a way that I could never imagine allowing myself to be. Her life was also what I imagined – wrongly – adult life to be like. I dreamed of an office job, my own apartment, friends, boyfriends and minibreaks.
After I watched Bridget Jones's Diary, I read the first two books. The second movie, Edge of Reason, was bad. The third movie was middling. I was appalled by the third book, which I scanned in order to get the gist of what the fourth movie might be about. Happily, the people behind the fourth movie cut out or toned down most of the worst bits in the third book and produced something tolerable.
That said, I found the fourth installment of Bridget Jones to be rather strange.
On the one hand, Bridget is now a rich widow who lives in a house near Hampstead Heath. Her children attend private school. Everyone in the movie exists in a leafy version of London where no one worries about money. On the other hand, Bridget has lost her husband and her father.
The movie is packaged as a romantic comedy but it’s really about recovering from grief. The gap between what the movie is really about and what it purports to be is at the root of some tonal quandaries.
The movie seems perfectly timed for post-Brexit, plague island Britain and is surgically designed for middled-aged women. I don’t remember the last time a movie was made so much for me. I don’t remember the last time I cried so much during a supposed romantic comedy.
Someone somewhere on the internet likened the Bridget franchise to the Before trilogy and while the Before trilogy is much better than Bridget, I do see the parallel. One thing that makes the new Bridget film so touching is that everyone has been brought back and they all look so old. The movie does more or less what it intends to do: it wraps you in a sad blanket of nostalgia that is occasionally punctuated by a decent joke or an attractive bare male chest.
I’m not sure, however, whether the latest movie does anything for non-Bridget aficionados or people who were not teenaged girls when the first movie came out.