Bridget Jones’s Diary: Do I Maybe Hate This Movie Based on One of My All-Time Favorite Books?

Now it is Bridget Jones Season.

I have a very important question that has been keeping me up late at night for months literally just occurred to me: Do I hate Bridget Jones’s Diary, the 2001 film based upon one of my very favorite books of all time ever???

The reasons I am asking myself and you all (bless you) this question about a 20-something year old movie are twofold: 1) It is currently January, i.e. what I like to think of as “Bridget Jones Season.” I think of January this way because for the past, I dunno, decade or so, I have either re-read or listened to the audiobook of BJ’s D (plus the three sequels) every year, usually beginning around New Year’s because A) the novel starts on New Year’s Day, so it seems seasonally appropriate and festive and B) it is very funny and cheering during the cold, dark, lonesome emotional trough that usually follows the holidays. (Although, if I’m honest, this year, in need of extra cheering in the wake of RECENT DISTRESSING POLITICAL EVENTS, I started early, on a particularly hungover day-after-Thanksgiving train ride up to Beacon, NY. It was the right decision, and I do not regret it.)

The other reason I am asking the above question is because there is a fourth Bridget Jones movie coming out in Feb. So, you know, content, zeitgeist, etc. (Plus, I’m stupid excited for it! Someone send me a screener NOW pleeeeeeeeease!)

I have loved Bridget Jones’s Diary — the novel by Helen Fielding, that is — since I first read it as a wee baby gay in high school. I vividly remember being on the beach and laughing hysterically at the bits where Bridget is drunk and still writing in her diary things like “arrgor issa blurry goofun” and “oof tumbl dover.” I still firmly believe that Fielding is one of the great comic writers of her generation, and crucially, it’s her style that I think I love most about the novel: the absurd shorthand in which much of the book is written; Bridget’s silly, quotidian observations; her ridiculous, often self-serving logic. To me, the novel is more about the daily indignities of just being a person in the world as described from the perspective of a relatable, amusingly messy, but — as Fielding describe her to me in a recent interview — fundamentally decent woman. That is what keeps me returning to the novel year after year, and not, also crucially, the romantic element.

Which brings me to the movie. I don’t remember seeing BJ’s D: The Major Motion Picture Starring American Actress Renée Zellweger for the first time or what my immediate reaction was. Returning to it over the years though, I have become increasingly ambivalent about it, despite — or, actually, probably because of — my abiding affection (and also near evangelical enthusiasm) for the source material.

You know that scene in Sex and the City where Matthew McCaughney plays a version of himself as a deranged sexual predator who is desperate to adapt Carrie Bradshaw’s columns into a movie and fully sexually harasses her during their meeting? (Deranged! So many deranged choices in that scene!) I think that scene is maybe a solid indication of what happened with the BJ’s D film adaptation. Not the sexual harassment stuff, but the part where McCaugenehegny is like “We need to flush out the central relationship between Carrie and Mr. Big!”

In the case of BJ’s D, most of the funny everyday stuff in the novel gets jettisoned, and what we end up with is a movie about a lady who dates a Mr. Wrong, gets dumped, and then falls in love with a Mr. Right. Which is all also in the book, but in the context of a bunch of other really entertaining shenanigans — whole diary entries about Bridget’s mad hair and trying to program her VCR, which may sound boring, but are actually vv funny! Basically, I feel like the film kind of flattens all of that — everything I love about the book — in an effort to turn it into a kind of stultifyingly basic 90-minute rom-com. Which we will now dive into.

It is New Year’s Day and unmarried 30-whateversomething mostly functional alcoholic smoker Bridget Jones goes to her parents’ house which she hates doing. But actually, SIDEBAR: Doesn’t going to a cozy family function on New Year’s Day sound kinda lovely? Like, better that than being hungover all day in bed by yourself watching Bob’s Burgers, but maybe that’s just me. Lest you think our Bridgo is an irredeemable ingrate, however, it must be said that her mother is impossible. Always making her put on ugly old lady clothes and introducing her to handsome rich men…record scratch!

Turns out Mother Jones has invited 1995 BBC Pride and Prejudice star Colin Firth, who most right-thinking people in 2001 understand to be a dreamboat, to New Year’s Day Turkey Curry Brunch or whatever. Unfortunately, he is playing Mr. [Mark] Darcy, who is uptight and extremely mean to Bridget for no reason. So she goes home all sad and STARTS a diary while listening to a not-Céline-Dion cover of “All by Myself.” (More on this movie’s weird bargain bin soundtrack later.)

Bridget’s main problems are 1) she thinks that she is fat and that that’s a bad thing, both of which are false; 2) she has a crush on Hugh Grant who is her boss; 3) she has these annoying friends, one of whom is Tom, who is gay and his whole personality is saying sexually naughty remarks to shock his straight girlfriends. (Please to note: I do not find this sadly recognizable characterization of a 90s gay offensive so much as merely annoying.)

Anyway, it turns out Hugh Grant is sexually interested in Bridget, so they do a montage of flirty instant messaging while “Don’t Get Me Wrong” by the Pretenders plays (hmm…Do I hate the Pretenders…?) and then they sleep together and start being boyfriends or whatever.

All the while, Colin Firth keeps showing up because he is stalking BJ apparently with the sole purpose of continuing his campaign of rudeness. Hugh Grant and Colin Firth also hate each other because, according to Hugh Grant, Colin Firth slept with his wife long ago.

Here we must pause, briefly, to gaze upon Hugh Grant being indisputably the sexiest he has ever been in his whole entire life:

And actually, I’m only just now wondering if this whole scenario is supposed to be, like, a reference to and inversion of the whole Colin-Firth-in-a-wet-shirt thing from the 1995 BBC Pride and Prejudice. If that was the case, and if I was Colin Firth, I would have been righteously annoyed at being so thoroughly, earth-scorchingly upstaged by Hugh Grant’s tits.

Anyway, everything seems to be going fine for BJ with Hugh Grant until she discovers that he has been cheating on her with a naked American Cindy Crawford-type with a dumb pixie cut and a weirdly ’90s tan (only way I know how to describe this). So they break up, and BJ gets real sad and the movie dips stupidly into what I guess is supposed to be affecting pathos or whatever, but is actually just lame sentiment. And this bugs me because while I firmly believe that Bridget has to be relatable, she’s also supposed to be a little over-the-top and her whole break-up heartbreak should reflect that. It should be histrionic and funny, not weepy. Which I believe confirms that this movie fundamentally misunderstands what’s so great about the book.

Moving on: Bridget moves on. She gets all empowered by Chaka Khan music and does exercising and gets a new job on TV.

Meanwhile, Colin Firth continues to stalk her, but quickly stops being so hateful because he realizes he’s in love with her. That seems to be going briefly ok, until Hugh Grant comes crawling back and the two handsomes have a big fisticuffs scene over Bridget. But then she remembers that Hugh Grant is a fuckwit and also that Colin Firth allegedly slept with his wife, which is also fuckwittage, and tells them both to sod off.

Except then, at Christmas, BJ’s mum says, “Oh, no, it was sexual fuckwit Hugh Grant who slept with nice, principled gentleman Colin Firth’s wife,” a thing she apparently knew all along for some reason? So, then BJ declares her love for Colin Firth, and later he shows up at her house unannounced and READS HER PRIVATE DIARY while she’s in the shower because he is a stalker with no boundaries. He seemingly storms out due to all the truthful stuff BJ wrote about how rude he has been the entire time they’ve known each other, leading to BJ…chasing after him in her underwear in the snow (just so dumb; not in the book), only to find that he actually just dipped out to buy her a new diary like a totally normal visitor to someone’s home would. They kiss and it is a happy ending.

Mr. Colin Darcy: Verified creepy stalker.

REASONS I MAYBE HATE THIS MOVIE:

1. The Soundtrack. The music in this movie is absurd. It’s like the music supervisor just copied the playlist of whatever easy-listening, ’90s adult contempo radio station their local CVS played at the time. Actually, I’m pretty sure most of the songs in the film were in heavy rotation at the discount grocery story I worked at in high school.

2. Renée Zellweger. I have nothing against RZ. She’s charming, generally. But I fundamentally resent her casting in this role. BJ is a quintessentially British character, and while Zellweger does a decent job with the accent I guess, there’s just something so…American about her. Her face — and I’m not here to address or judge or speculate about any cosmetic surgery she may or may not have ever had — will just always say “Los Angeles” to me for some reason, not “London.”

Also, she plays Bridget as too much of a wimp. BJ is supposed to be hapless and insecure, sure. But I’ve always read her as more assertively herself, more outspoken, less apologetic for merely existing. Possibly a lot of that comes through in the book because it’s all from Bridget’s perspective. We get her interiority, all the thoughts and opinions, however daft, that she doesn’t necessarily express out loud. Rewatching, BJ’s D most recently, I kept thinking about how Zellweger plays her like a sad, wounded puppy.

3. It’s basic. It feels like a film about elder Gen X-ers made by prime Boomers. It feels like a movie about urban singles made by married suburbanites. It feels like underbaked Nora Ephron without Ephron’s wit — without Helen Fielding’s wit!

Bridget Jones’s Diary, the novel, is a satire. (To wit! That’s what all those killjoy writers who complain about Bridget’s constant calorie counting and weight obsession misunderstand about it; the point is that all that is unhealthy and borderline pathological and the result of a sexist, fat-shaming culture!) It’s an exaggerated spoof of what it’s like to be single — specifically, a single woman — in your 30s. But the movie smooths down that satire into an admittedly pleasant, though not terribly interesting rom-com.

4. It is not the book. Frankly, it’s as simple as that. It just fundamentally fails to capture the book’s tone. Which, I almost cannot fault it for, because the more I think about it, the more I realize that that’s probably an impossible task. The book is told entirely in Bridget’s — i.e. Helen Fielding’s — distinctive voice, and while the movie does try to capture some of that via Zellweger’s voiceover, it falls well short of the mark. For my money at least. But, like, who is going to watch a 90-minute movie that’s just a woman narrating her life the whole time?

I’ve often wondered what someone like Sharon Horgan or Phoebe Waller Bridge or even Jennifer Saunders in her prime would do with the material in an episodic TV format. The novel is, after all, basically episodic, and as Feilding told me, the newspaper columns on which it was based were written more-or-less like a weekly sitcom. It seems to me that that would be the more natural format for a BJ’s D adaptation: something more longform and immersive, like Sex and the City in its prime, in which Bridget’s absurd misadventures aren’t reduced to just the Daniel Cleaver v. Mark Darcy scenario.

COUNTERPOINT!

After I wrote all that, I drank a bottle of cheap Chardonnay and rewatched BJ’s D AGAIN and had a goddamn grand ol’ time. This is what I found in my notes app the next day:

oh! teh friends arent terrible I love them! Sally Phillps ans that guy from Glactica or whatevt andsome other lady. I wanna be friens w/ allof them! This move nedds more fieindsr!!!!! And Renee zwllweger/s LOVELYS! Shes soap retry and cute! Also colins Ferrle and Huge Rant should makeout an I would warch it in 2000 (not now tho probavy). Sundrackyz till bushitt tho GOOGOD! Gonnoo waht Edy of Reasun now due for fun.

Next week: Drunken notes on Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason.