Bridget Jones is Back

Bridget Jones has accompanied a generation of readers and filmgoers in a series of romantic comedies about trying to find happiness in the modern world of love. Now, she's back in a new film, widowed, a single mother, and ready to try to find love again.

Helen Fielding originally wrote Bridget Jones' Diary as a series of columns in The Independent newspaper. It was so popular it was released as a novel. Bridget was a neurotic thirtysomething being pushed by societal expectations (and her overbearing mother) to settle down, but finding potential partners deeply disappointing. Each diary entry was prefaced by the number of cigarettes she had smoked, her weight and the alcohol she had consumed. And filled with stories of the awkward situations she got herself into and her frustration with the “smug marrieds”, her friends who were partnered up and constantly pushing her to do the same.

The original columns were written at the time that the BBC’s adaptation of Pride and Prejudice with Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth was compulsory viewing for the Bridgets of this world. Fielding was inspired by Austen, making the ibject of object of Bridget’s hate-love relationship a socially awkward Mark Darcy. As in Pride and Prejudice, the couple initially have very negative opinions of each other before finding their respective lovable qualities. The Pride and Prejudice link was extended to the film version of the diary, where Renee Zellweger as Bridget fell in love with Colin Firth as Mark Darcy.

Mad About the Boy is the fourth film in the franchise, though it is based on Fielding’s third Bridget novel, published in 2013 (Bridget Jones’s Baby (2016) wasn’t based on a novel). In Mad About the Boy, Bridget, played for the fourth time by Renee Zellwegger, is in her 50s. She has been a single mother since Darcy was killed in a typically heroic manner while negotiating the release of hostages in Sudan. Four years on, Bridget is finally ready to enter the dating scene again, but everything has changed.

Trying out a dating app for the first time she meets 28-year-old parks supervisor Roxter, played by Leo Woodall. But this wouldn’t be Bridget Jones if there weren’t other men on the scene. Her son's science teacher  Mr Wallaker, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, is the more sensible Darcy-type character. And the dastardly Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant) reappears offering to babysit the children.

Life mirrored fiction when Fielding herself was widowed in 2016 after her husband died of cancer, leaving her a single mother to two. As she wrote the screenplay, she says, “I wanted to show how you can feel both a sense of humour and a sense of perspective – your friends, your community, your resilience can get you through these things and you can still laugh.”

 

 

Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy
On general release 12 February