Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy review - older, sadder Bridget has started ditching the ditz

Bridget Jones has grown up: v.v.g. Our heroine is still prone to daft pratfalls and gaffes and bursts of sensational idiot dancing. But passing time has lent her an enhanced self-awareness that has nothing to do with calories consumed. This Bridget can bring the pinprick of tears to the eyes as well as make you laugh.

The first generation of Bridget fans, like her creator Helen Fielding, are now in their sixties and beyond, and possibly experiencing, like Bridget (and Fielding), the loss of a partner through divorce or death. Bridget’s beloved Mark Darcy (Colin Firth, pictured below with Zellweger) has been blown up in Darfur on a human rights mission, and four years later she hasn't moved on, her grief is still fairly raw. She dreads dating, baring her body to strangers, all that predictable stuff. So the material has a learning curve built into it from the start.

But what is Bridget to learn, and from whom? Her house is boho-chaotic, her children loveable but seemingly ungovernable, especially little Mabel (Mila Jankovic), who has apparently been taking her cues from Karen in Outnumbered. Billy (Casper Knopf), the “Baby” in the third film, is now an introverted, chess-playing near-nerd, his father's son. Where Bridget goes from here depends on who she asks.   

Her inner circle hand out nostrums of the “Go get laid” variety, whereas she is happier staying home in her messy-but-fabulous Hampstead house. Her mum (Gemma Jones) and bestie Una (Celia Imrie) mouth pieties at her over FaceTime from their care home. Her gynaecologist (Emma Thompson) writes her a prescription that says, “Stop being a twat”. 

It takes TV presenter Miranda (brilliant deadpan Sarah Solemani) to shortcircuit her inaction by signing her up to Tinder. Which is where 29-year-old Roxster (Leo Woodall), an angelically handsome park warden, reconnects with her after rescuing the whole family from a tree they are stuck up on the Heath, Suddenly, her juices are flowing again, her giant panties are traded in for a lacy thong, and she goes back to being a TV producer with her old team. The Perfect Mother (Leila Farzad) at the school gates she despises supplies her with the perfect nanny (Nico Parker); and even a “spare” has been lined up for her by the writing team (Fielding, Dan Mazer and Abi Morgan), the new science master at Billy’s school, Mr Wallaker (Chiwetel Ejiofor). True to romantic fiction type, he’s a loud disciplinarian she takes an initial dislike to.

So far, so standard-issue Bridget Jones: a luxe life played out in London’s property hotspots, where it is unnaturally sunny though always snowy for the Big Finale at Christmas, all presented as a poor-me comedy scenario, with only Darcy’s good deeds keeping it remotely real. 

Melancholy is allowed further into these sunny uplands than Bridget films have gone in for before. In a touching sequence, Bridget and the children go to the Heath to release balloons on Darcy’s birthday, and we watch from a distance as the little balloons drift out of the frame. Firth is a poignant presence in several scenes, conjured up by Bridget from the grave to accompany her to difficult dinner parties and special occasions. In a particularly sad scene, she talks to him one night about her failure to cope without him. Even the hardest heart will be rooting for her at this point.

But the narrative takes a slightly unexpected course as Bridget’s romance with Roxster progresses. She blossoms at work, takes on challenges she had been avoiding, such as helping out at school with the Perfect Mother’s jobs-week activities (where a previous volunteer was a Nobel Prize winner) and generally stops behaving like a ditz. In a cupboard are rows of her red diaries, the last one untouched since the day Darcy died. Out comes a girlie novelty pencil with feathers on the end for new entries, and Bridget’s voice-over returns. She has new rules – do not text when ghosted or drunk – and maturer Bridget sticks to them.

This is still a big-screen romcom for those with a sweet tooth, however astute Fielding’s takedown of middle-class metropolitans contnues to be. But its most successful moments come via little touches when it isn’t straining to be comedic. When, for example, Bridget decides sex is on the cards and she needs condoms, the first part of the scene is very much Old Bridget as she does a panicked supermarket sweep of the family planning shelves at the chemist’s and progresses both proud and embarrassed to the till. Where the cashier revels in announcing each item as she rings it up, including the size of the condom. Of course, somebody she knows is also in the queue behind her, as is suddenly revealed. The set-up is predictable but the execution of it is deftly done. 

There are many such felicities of timing and tone here, briskly edited – the Bluetooth business conversations of the Perfect Mother’s grim husband that cleverly intrude into the action; a hilarious reprise of Firth's wet-shirt moment as the other Mr Darcy; a tender callback to Mark’s novelty Christmas jumpers; the crisply caustic delivery of Emma Thompson (pictured left), never better deployed. And at its heart, an organ he admits he was shocked to discover he had, Hugh Grant’s Daniel Cleaver, bookending the action. He is still a dedicated roué, but devastatingly, drily witty, and ultimately affecting.

Zellweger is now so embedded in Bridget’s character that it seems wrong to question her performance, but she could dial down some of her facial twitches and not walk around like a blissed out teen quite so much. At pratfalling, though, she is unsurpassed, and nobody does talking through a serious trout pout better. She is still resolutely a comic fiction but emerges from her raucous female tribe here as not just the sweetest but the sanest among them.

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