Hold the blue soup and pack away the big knickers — Bridget Jones has finally grown up (OMG! V V exciting!). And yes, we all love dear “Bridge”. Over three increasingly shambolic movie outings we’ve delighted as this de facto national treasure (deftly done by the Texan actress Renée Zellweger) has boozily pratfallen into mud piles and out of taxis, worrying incessantly about her “wobbly bits”. But you can only play the nincompoop for so long and, thankfully and rather thrillingly, it’s all change here — in a film of sly sobriety and uncommon depths.
The titles hit like thunder, 15 minutes in, with a rousing bedroom dance montage accompanied by David Bowie’s Modern Love. It wakes us from the realisation, announced in almost the first scene, that Mark Darcy (Colin Firth), the brooding franchise hero and Bridget’s husband, is dead. This is not a spoiler but the heart of the movie, co-written by Helen Fielding and adapted from her third Jones novel. It drops Bridget into a place of fiftysomething reflection, where death is tangible, grief is a bedfellow and her greatest crisis is not about skirts and weight loss but whether the memory of Darcy will fade from the minds of their two young children. Early in the film Firth appears twice as the ghost of Darcy in scenes charged with sudden and unexpectedly wrenching intensity.
This is, however, still very much a Bridget Jones movie by brand. So after some deathbed inspiration from Jim Broadbent as Bridget’s father, Colin (“It’s not enough to survive, you have to live”), our heroine embarks on yet another wacky interpersonal odyssey that includes a reinvigorated TV career and a nascent love triangle featuring a charming and steady teacher called Mr Wallaker (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and a hunky 29-year-old park warden and biochemistry student, Roxster (Leo Woodall).
The relationship with Roxster is sweetly handled, even if the showstopping, swoon-worthy swimming sequences are lifted, almost completely, from the 1992 Levi’s commercial Swimmer (edited to Dinah Washington’s Mad About the Boy). The Wallaker relationship is also good fun, and features the best Bridget quip yet, delivered in voiceover when an alarmingly buff Ejiofor strips off during a rainstorm — “Ding f***ing dong!”
But it’s Hugh Grant, returning as the ageing, inveterate “ladies’ man” Daniel Cleaver, who steals the show. Cleaver’s conspicuous vanity, now in his sixties, is even more comical, his womanising inherently ridiculous. And yet his bond with Bridget is grounded, believable and quite lovely. The pair are like characters from Richard Linklater’s Boyhood. We’ve watched them grow and evolve, yet stay the same, and yet not, over 24 years. Their affection for each other is the film’s greatest strength, because it dovetails neatly into its most poignant theme: time devours all. But with gags.
★★★★☆
15, 125min
In cinemas from February 13
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