Bridget Jones’s Diary is a 97-minute romantic comedy that made $282 million on a $25 million budget, and the reason is standing in the middle of nearly every frame. Renée Zellweger plays Bridget, a 32-year-old British single woman who resolves, as a New Year’s promise to herself, to take control of her life by keeping a diary in which she always tells the complete truth. Zellweger earned an Academy Award nomination for it, and she earned the nomination.
Trailer, via Screen Bites.
Two Men, One Diary
The plot is borrowed with a wink. Helen Fielding’s 1996 novel was a loose adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, and the film keeps the shape. Bridget’s charming boss, Daniel Cleaver, played by Hugh Grant, takes an interest in her. Meanwhile she keeps running into Mark Darcy, played by Colin Firth, a rather disagreeable acquaintance she cannot help finding quietly attractive. Two men vie for her. She writes it all down.
The Cast Around Her
Grant plays the cad with visible pleasure, and Firth plays the stiff with a patience that pays off late. Jim Broadbent and Gemma Jones are Bridget’s parents, and both are funnier than the supporting-parent role usually allows. James Callis, Sally Phillips and Shirley Henderson are the friends Tom, Shazza and Jude, and their scenes with Zellweger have the loose, overlapping rhythm of people who actually drink together.
Direction and Script
Sharon Maguire directed from a screenplay by Fielding, Andrew Davies and Richard Curtis, and the shooting took place largely on location in London and the home counties between August and November 2000. The film premiered at the Empire in London on March 10, 2001 and opened in the United Kingdom and the United States on the same day, April 13. It looks like the city it is set in, which was not a given for a comedy of this size.
Why It Holds Up
The joke of the film is not that Bridget is a mess. It is that she keeps score, on herself and everyone else, and the diary makes her honest about the scoring. The tagline says it plainly: all women keep score, only the great ones put it in writing. Zellweger plays that honesty without ever begging for sympathy, and the film is at its best when it lets her be embarrassed and unbothered at the same time.
Where It Coasts
The romance runs on rails. Anyone who knows Austen knows which man wins from the first dinner party, and the film does very little to complicate the route. The drama listed in its genres is thin. A few set pieces play as sketches stitched together rather than scenes that build, and the third act arrives more because the runtime says so than because the story demands it.
The Verdict
Critics gave it generally positive reviews and singled out Zellweger, and that is the right emphasis. Bridget Jones’s Diary is a modest film with one great performance and two good ones, and it became part of English pop culture because it never pretended to be more than that.
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