A Diarist in Distress
Renée Zellweger is a huggable human pastry everyone wants to
take a bite of, and in Bridget Jones’s
Diary she’s more delicious than ever. Having scarfed down a few hundred
eclairs herself to gain the weight to play the single, 32-year-old,
Chardonnay-swigging, chain-smoking, lovelorn title character in this lively
film version of Helen Fielding’s bestseller, there is also a great deal more of
her to hug.
Cut from the same
romantic taffeta as Notting Hill and Four Weddings and a Funeral , the movie
is about a year in the life of a gal for whom the past is a zero and the future
shows less promise than a winter in Vermont without snow. On New Year’s Day, as
she endures another traditional turkey-curry buffet with her nagging mother,
Bridget peruses her resolutions-to stop drinking, cease smoking, lose weight
and find a responsible boyfriend-and starts a diary to improve her life.
Unfortunately for her (but lucky for us), her character keeps getting in the
way.
Bridget works for a London publishing house, where she
begins an e-mail flirtation and then a real after-hours affair with her boss
(Hugh Grant). We know he’s a narcissistic cad before she does, but when she finds
a naked woman in his flat, she dumps him and chucks her job at the same time.
Newly ensconced as a reporter for a current-affairs show called Sit Up Britain , she gets a scoop while
covering a political refugee’s trial when the defendant’s lawyer (Colin Firth)
grants her an exclusive interview, and a new affair begins with this handsome
human-rights barrister. Things are looking up. But life gets in the way.
Her parents’ marriage curdles when her flaky Mum (Gemma
Jones) leaves her morose couch-potato Dad (Jim Broadbent) for a flamboyant poof
who sells costume jewelry on the Home Shopping Network. The handsome lawyer
dumps Bridget for an over-confident American girl. Making her mark on society
by attending a chic garden tea, she shows
up as a prostitute, mistakenly thinking it’s a costume party. Even when
she does the Good Samaritan bit by dropping coins into a homeless couple’s cup,
her charitable pride is crushed as she walks away, overhearing one of them say,
“What a lovely, caring person!” “Yes,” says the other, “shame about the
thighs.”
Bridget Jones just can’t
seem to get her moons in balance or her planets to align. No wonder she loses
herself in vodka and Chaka Khan records before she sees the light. Regular
bouts of public embarrassment and culinary disaster eventually force Bridget’s
two admirers to duke it out with flying fists, leaving one of them to recognize
her true charms. I won’t tell you which one. Suffice it to say it all ends up
with Bridget, still a size 12 but working on those thighs night and day,
chasing Mr. Right down the street in the snow in her skimpy knickers. The kiss,
in that fadeout embrace, is right out of Barbra Streisand’s sappy fiasco The Mirror Has Two Faces -a small cavil,
considering all the thorny and sympathetic humor that has preceded it. So the
year in the life of a girl with low self-esteem ends in the kind of Hollywood
finale Bridget has always dreamed of-but, we suspect, a new diary is just
beginning.
It’s fortunate that such a larky update of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice manages to balance
sentimentality with farce so skillfully. Neither Bridget nor her diary takes
things the least bit seriously. Just as Candace Bushnell’s Sex and the City was based on a series in the pages of The New
York Observer , Ms. Fielding culled the diary entries in Bridget Jones’s Diary from her own
regular column in the Independent .
Both deal with the concerns of career girls, anxiety-riddled and driven to
comic despair by the need to “have it all.” The big difference is that Bridget
is British. She makes impossible social blunders, rarely wastes time shopping,
and celebrates failures at home and office with more irony than fury. The Brits
are better at self-deprecating modesty (even on a big budget), and the efforts
of everyone involved to poke fun at
themselves are funny, engaging, and winning.
I hadn’t thought about it, but one London critic was helpful
in pointing out the puncturing of various illusions, beginning with Hugh Grant,
whose real-life scandal with a Hollywood hooker is snickered over in the book,
and who plays against type in the film with the prissy line: “I’m a terrible
disaster with a posh voice and a bad character.” It’s also no secret that Colin
Firth’s stuffy lawyer is named Darcy, and Mr. Firth played Jane Austen’s haughty
hero Mr. Darcy in the BBC adaptation of Pride
and Prejudice , a series that Bridget watches compulsively (and which was
also written by Andrew Davies, a co-author of the Bridget Jones screenplay). For further puncturing of literary
illusion, Salman Rushdie and Jeffrey Archer appear as themselves in
none-too-flattering cameos. Richard Curtis, another of the film’s writers, is
Helen Fielding’s real-life ex-boyfriend, and Sharon Maguire, making her debut
as the film’s director, is the model for one of Bridget’s best friends, the
man-hungry feminist Sharon (nicknamed Shazzer). Art imitates life (or vice
versa) on both sides of the Atlantic, regardless of accent.
Which brings me at last to Renée Zellweger, whose accent is
so perfect you’d swear she came right out of Hampstead on Heath instead of the
University of Texas. More conventional casting would have landed Cate Blanchett
or Kate Winslet the role, but Ms. Z. has an advantage: She seems more of an
outsider trying to fit in. She’s as clumsy and gauche as a Texas armadillo,
victimized by an endless stream of “bad-hair days” in clothes that make her
look like one of the kids on Ding Dong
School , but much more user-friendly with her studied accent and
delightfully on-target timing. And, of course, there’s the unavoidable touch
factor she’s always got going for her, which makes you want to pinch her first,
then rub on the astringent before she bruises. She’s very good at the farcical
elements, too, such as when, during a voiceover from her diary pledging to be
sober, she falls out of a cab in a drunken heap, or mimes a song using a
breadstick for a mike. The sweetness, the longing, the ability to laugh at her own pathetic thirtysomething need to get
her act together are beautifully modulated into a charming and dysfunctional
character portrait that is nothing less than adorable.
Bridget Jones’s Diary
is a lighthearted, lightheaded burst of cool energy in a sluggish year. It’s
the kind of film you can sip easily, like Bridget’s dry Chardonnay, and leave
feeling dizzy.
Killer Cop
After surviving all
those near-death experiences in Kiss the
Girls , Morgan Freeman appears once again, in Along Came a Spider , as Dr. Alex Cross, the brilliant detective and
fearless forensic psychologist in Washington, D.C., who specializes in tracking
down and profiling the freaks and maniacs nobody else can catch. It’s another
adaptation from the popular series by James Patterson, a writer of pulp
thrillers which populate the nation’s beaches every summer like popsicle wrappers
and wraparound Ray-Bans. Cross is always throwing in the towel on wacko rapists
and aggressive serial killers, but he never seems to get around to taking a
vacation from mayhem or changing jobs. This is as it should be, because a
vacation from mayhem would deprive us of a lot of fun watching a fine actor
comfortably wearing a familiar role like suede elbow patches.
In Along Came a Spider ,
the spider is a particularly cunning and mean-spirited freak who is in the
kidnapping business for fame, not ransom money. This fiend kidnaps the daughter
of a United States Senator (Michael Moriarty), basing each facet of the game on
the 1932 Lindbergh baby kidnapping and hiding the clues in computers. Every
clue is meticulously analyzed by Dr. Cross (with much brow furrowing and chin
scratching by Mr. Freeman, who does this sort of thing so well) and his bright,
beautiful and dedicated new assistant, Jezzie Flannigan (Monica Potter), the
Secret Service agent whose negligence was responsible for the child’s disappearance
in the first place.
Midway through the film, after a second kidnapping goes
awry, Dr. Cross and Jezzie think they’re close to solving the case. Suddenly,
the villain abandons plans for committing the “crime of the century,” the
Lindbergh plot seems to be out the window, and the character of the criminal
they think they’ve figured out reverses 180 degrees when he demands a ransom of
$10 million in diamonds delivered in a thermos. Up to this point, as
psychological thrillers go, Along Came a
Spider is not very thrilling. Then Dr. Cross traps the loony and kills him
in a crossfire that wounds Jezzie. The movie seems to be over before anything
nerve-wracking has even happened. Is that all there is? The audience’s
disappointment is palpable. But hold on to that popcorn. You ain’t seen nothing
yet. This thing is just revving up.
In an amazing plot twist, the Lindbergh copycat turns out to
be another kidnapper who makes the first creep look like a Harvard Lampoon parody. Then, while Cross and Jezzie race against
time to save the child from a real killer more ruthless than the first, the
plot twists again and a third archfiend enters the picture, one who is
brilliant enough to outwit them all. I won’t spoil the fun by saying more, but
I can promise you enough clever surprises and pulse-quickening suspense to make
you gasp out loud. The slow pace, leisurely plotting and lack of terror in the
early sections of the film are deliberate attempts to calm your nerves before
the hairs rise on the back of your neck for real.
A lot of that tempo and structure is the work of the gifted
New Zealand director Lee Tamahori, whose excellent and unusual films have never
failed to excite me. They include the powerful dramas Once Were Warriors and Mulholland
Falls and the terrifying, underrated outdoor thriller The Edge , with Alec Baldwin, Anthony Hopkins and the most ferocious
man-eating bear ever seen on film. Mr. Tamahori is a distinguished and creative
filmmaker whose visions are unique, gratifying and never what you expect. I admire
Morgan Freeman’s unflappable strength and Monica Potter’s extraordinary beauty
and cool intelligence under fire, but it is Mr. Tamahori’s steely-eyed clarity
of vision and unexpected tension that traps in Along Came a Spider’s eerie, entertaining web.
