Movie review: Bridget Jones Mad About the Boy is actually really excellent

Bridget Jones’ Diary is easily one of those movies you rewatch every year. You’re probably know all the lines, and not just the iconic ones.

The sequels, Bridget Jones: Edge of Reason in 2004 and Bridget Jones’ Baby in 2016, weren’t great so you’d be forgiven for thinking that the fourth film in the franchise will surely be a case of diminishing returns.

Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy not only escapes the curse but completely reverses it. This is the easily the best Bridget Jones instalment since the first. It’s not great, it’s excellent.

Packed with goofy comedy as well as emotional gravity, it manages to balance and shift between two sometimes conflicting tones with sensitivity and aplomb. It is not easy to blend a serious drama about grief and loss with the physical comedy of our clumsy hero, but director Michael Morris pulls it off.

What you have is a mature film that captures all the ups-and-downs of life, and all the truths we can hold at the same time. Bridget can quietly sit with her pain and have fun sexy times with a younger lover.

Morris is a newcomer to the franchise, as is co-screenwriter Abi Morgan, an esteemed scribe who has penned the likes of The Split and Shame. The two have brought a level of storytelling sophistication to the franchise to match Bridget’s growth.

In the first film, Bridget (Renee Zellweger) is a young woman in her early 30s trying to figure things out, and of course it’s OK that now in her 50s, she still feels adrift in some parts of her life but the challenges are different – and this film recognises and reflects that.

Based on Helen Fielding’s 2012 book, Mad About the Boy, the movie is set four years after the death of Mark Darcy (Colin Firth, who briefly reprises his role). Bridget is a single mother of two school-aged kids (Casper Knopf and Mila Jankovic) and she’s not ready to move on.

She’s burnt dinner and she barely gets dressed out of her pyjamas most days but she is still quintessentially Bridget, which is to say she approaches everything with a warmth and vitality, even in her low moments.

Her circle – Shaz (Sally Phillips), Tom (James Callis), Jude (Shirley Henderson), Miranda (Sarah Solemani) and even a resurrected Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant), still a cad but a more reflective one – are there for her, and pushes her to finally rejoin the land of the living.

There are two men she meets in quick succession — the younger Roxster (Leo Woodall) and her kid’s teacher Mr Wallicker (Chiwetel Ejiofor). Roxster immediately catches her eye and she’s surprised when he seeks her out on a dating app. While Mr Walliker is aloof and odd, but you get the feeling the film is setting something up.

Despite the promos, Mad About the Boy is not a love triangle with tricky entanglements. They’ve already done that with Bridget Jones’ Baby and it was tedious.

Instead, these love interests don’t cross over and the new characters are given their own chance to breathe in a story structure that doesn’t short change anyone.

Maybe it’s because this story is not actually about Bridget finding love again after Darcy’s death but about Bridget finding the joy in living after such a foundation-shaking loss.

That’s why it works better as a film than the other sequels. The story engine is not will-they-won’t-they, the stakes are centred on Bridget being at peace, and finding a way forward with her children. That’s more elusive than a new paramour.

There is proper character growth here, and not just for Bridget but also for the people in her life, like Daniel. They have evolved and it feels as if everyone here actually got on with their lives while we weren’t watching. So, they are familiar but not the same.

It’s the kind of wonderful filmmaking that makes you angry all over again that And Just Like That was so terrible and should never have been made with that combination of writers, directors and producers.

Bridget Jones will likely be Zellweger’s most iconic character and that’s because she is just so terrific in the role. She clearly has deep compassion and unequivocal love for Bridget and you feel it in every moment.

It’s why we love her too.

Rating: 4/5

Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy is in cinemas on February 13