Just before Bridget Jones’s Diary was published in 1996, there was a single embargoed proof copy doing the rounds in the offices of Picador, the book’s publisher.
The twentysomethings and thirtysomethings in the office raced through that single copy in turn, leaving it tattered and dog-eared, if not quite soaked in Chardonnay and Ben & Jerry’s Chocolate Fudge Brownie ice cream.
Helen Fielding’s book was pitch-perfect and extremely funny – because, like most great comedy, it had truth at its heart. The first film, also called Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001), was spot-on, too.
The same can’t be said for Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy – the fourth film in the series. It doesn’t have that kernel of truth. Instead, it’s a clumsy weepie-meets-romcom, with the original actors nailed onto its creaking structure, and the comedy elements of Bridget’s character awkwardly hammered on top.
Those actors remain brilliant. Renée Zellweger’s English accent and delivery are flawless. When she went undercover in those same Picador offices as a publishing assistant before the first film came out, no one rumbled her.
Colin Firth is a lesson in sombre understatement, but he barely appears as Mark Darcy, Bridget’s husband, except as a ghost. That’s because Darcy is dead – and the film begins with Bridget facing the agonies of widowhood and single motherhood.
And, without Colin Firth to spar with, Hugh Grant is in a tricky position as Daniel Cleaver, the charming, monstrous rogue. Some of the best bits of the earlier films involved Cleaver sparring with Darcy in pathetic, middle-class fights.
Left to his own devices, Grant is still a masterly actor, but he is acting into a void, without Firth as his foil. And without Zellweger as his love interest. Cleaver’s super-shagger mega-confidence has faded as he hits his mid-sixties and faces a lonely, sickly old age with an estranged teenage son.
Bridget’s gloom is lifted by the boy of the title, Roxster, played by the hot young thing of the moment, Leo Woodall.
Woodall is perfectly good, and good-looking, but not nearly as good, or good-looking, as Hugh Grant – even now. He’s little more than a symbol of youth – at one point stripping off his soaked white shirt, in an echo of Colin Firth’s strip scene as Fitzwilliam Darcy in Pride and Prejudice (1995).
You feel nothing for Roxster. You feel nothing for Bridget as her grief is momentarily relieved by him. And you still don’t feel anything for Bridget when she finds real happiness with a more suitable man of her own age, a teacher at her children’s school, Mr Wallaker – played by Chiwetel Ejiofor.
Mr Wallaker is in fact a real person – in real life, the slightly differently spelt Mr Walliker, a teacher at University College School, north London, who taught Helen Fielding’s son, Dash.
But, in real life, Helen Fielding didn’t end up with Mr Walliker. She just thought he was a very good teacher. In that jump from real life to the romance demanded by fiction, ramped up by the demands of film adaptation, you lose the suspension of disbelief, good as Ejiofor is at trying to suspend it.
The chord the first Bridget book and first Bridget film struck now sounds off-key. In the packed cinema where I watched the new film, there were a few laughs from Bridget loyalists. But there was none of that electric feel – or the gales of laughter – you get with a film that really goes straight to the heart.
Helen Fielding’s co-screenwriters – Dan Mazer (co-creator, with Sacha Baron Cohen, of the sublime Ali G, Borat and Brüno) and Abi Morgan (The Split and Eric) – couldn’t be any better qualified. And even Richard Curtis and Andrew Davies – who wrote the screenplay of Bridget Jones’s Diary with Fielding – would have been hard-pressed to save this project.
There are well-observed lines on the agonies of the excruciatingly polite post-bereavement dinner party. And there are a few moments when you feel your heartstrings plucked by Bridget’s sadness.
But, in the end, this isn’t an elegy for Mark Darcy, but an elegy for the triumph of Bridget Mark I – the thirtysomething who mirrored the true feelings of a generation, heightened those feelings and turned them into comic genius.
