Britain’s best-known twittering hamster is back, doing her trademark blonde pout. Renée Zellweger’s Bridget Jones has become one of the more likeable roles of her career. The accent is eccentric but consistent, and the Bridget films have thankfully never pandered to nasty American humour targeting British teeth. What is most impressive about Zellweger’s Bridget is her very plausible, capillary-distressed British skin. Not the traditional A-lister’s undifferentiated honey-bronze sheen, but a skin redolent of brisk walks and camping holidays, undertaken in inclement weather.
In Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, Bridget is now a successful if chaotic cable TV presenter and she’s got her Mr Right: Mark Darcy, the uptight human rights barrister with a heart and, indeed, bank account of gold, played by Colin Firth. They’ve been together for a couple of months; he sleeps over at her flat and every night they shag for England, although she doesn’t get to come to his flash townhouse — and there’s a certain gorgeous twentysomething hanging about him that Bridget doesn’t like the look of.
But the question in all our minds is: When, when, oh when, is Hugh Grant coming on? Because this movie’s big plus is its big minus and it’s exactly the same as the first time. Grant is far and away the best thing in it and when he comes on, the enjoyment factor advances with a great swoosh. His Daniel Cleaver, as exquisitely groomed and tailored as ever, is now improbably employed as a travel presenter on the same channel, popping up in Rome and dismissing the Sistine Chapel as ”poof interior design gone bonkers”, and then sashaying around the Serpentine Gallery offering his reactionary but perceptive views on John Currin.
The station naturally suggests that he and Bridge team up. Bridget is scornful but it isn’t long before the old black magic cranks into life with the movie cheekily reminding us that he and Bridget have enjoyed anal love, and playfully implying that this is not an intimacy that Mark has enjoyed. Daniel claims to Bridget that he is now in group therapy for his sex addiction: ”I hug people who smell.” I would have liked to see those scenes.
In a spirit of ”if it ain’t broke why fix it?”, director Beeban Kidron’s sequel reprises almost everything that worked in the first film, including Mark and Daniel’s girlie jumper-pulling fight, but peps up the action with foreign location-work: a stopover in a ski resort (unfunny) and a women’s prison in Bangkok (rather funny). It’s all part of the strange unreality of the Bridget universe, conceived in the distant 1990s, when relationships were the most important thing in the world. Entertaining stuff, mostly, but Grant is absent for ages and ages, and without him it’s just not the same. — Â