Bridget Jones Forever

Once upon a time, Bridget Jones was 32. Now, the fictional diarist-slash-girlfriend-slash–television producer–slash-widow is 51. This matters — maybe not to society at large, but in an emotional way. Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, the fourth and latest film based on Helen Fielding’s newspaper column and subsequent novel series, is set approximately eight years after Bridget Jones’s Baby and four years after Bridget’s husband, Mark Darcy (Colin Firth), was killed on a humanitarian mission in the Sudan. There is a love triangle in Mad About the Boy, but it is not really a movie about love — or at least not the romantic kind.

Bridget has lost much of what made the early years of her life joyful. Darcy is gone. Her beloved dad (Jim Broadbent) passed away. She has two adorable children Billy (Casper Knopf) and Mabel (Mila Jankovic) whom she loves, of course, but they rob her of peace, quiet, and freedom. She left her job to raise her children, and since her departure, television news journalism has gone full fluff, her old co-workers who once reported on the war battlefields now reduced to cooking segments. Bridget’s struggles in this latest film are less so consequences of her own bumbling, clumsy actions — though she is still an endearing fuckup — and more about making sense of a world that just doesn’t. The emotional journey she navigates in Mad About the Boy is more than compelling enough to justify this fourth entry into the series; it’s enough to make the case for a fifth, and a sixth, and a seventh. As long as Bridget Jones lives, we should be allowed to tag along for the ride.

Instead of selling out its own ethos, the Bridget Jones franchise has doubled down on what really matters. It ought not to be this moving to see a cast of regulars keep coming back, but having Hugh Grant’s caddish Daniel Cleaver back from the not-actually-dead as well as Bridget’s core group of friends — the outspoken Sharon (Sally Phillips), the nervy Jude (Shirley Henderson), and the bitchy Tom (James Callis) — to say nothing of Bridget’s mom (Gemma Jones) and her co-worker Miranda (Sarah Solemani), grants us the chance to see familiar faces now with wrinkles, necks with lines, and teeth that aren’t quite perfect. That Bridget’s tried-and-true companions remain with her also means she exists beyond her marriage plots. Grant’s Daniel has become, like many once-lotharios, just a boy friend. More than an object of desire or scorn, he’s someone who has been with Bridget since the very beginning. That’s more meaningful, perhaps, than having a boyfriend could ever be. And few can boast friendships of this length in their own lives.

The Bridget Jones series was inspired by Jane Austen, famed for her marriage plots. But what makes Austen eminently readable is her characters’, and her own, enthusiasm for the world. It is not just that falling in love grants you the gift of a partner so much as it inspires you to fall in love with everything around you. Mad About the Boy cooks up another obligatory love triangle — Leo Woodall’s hunky young Roxster versus Chiwetel Ejiofor’s standoffish science teacher, Mr. Wallaker — but the “which guy?” of it all has little to do with what makes the film great. Mad About the Boy, despite its title, is really about the insanity that comes from trying and failing and eventually moving on with life. Bridget cannot justify nor make sense of the hurt she’s endured; no one is asking her to. All she can do is what she’s always done, busying herself with the bizarre inanities and romantic dalliances that have always filled her days. “Which one of these men is right for Bridget?” is a much less interesting question than “How will time continue to pass for Bridget?”

Over the past few years, several film series have stretched beyond their narrative capacities through recasts and reboots: Different actors have played Batman and Mad Max and even Elle Woods, and Twisters, Top Gun: Maverick, and Alien: Romulus unleashed a bunch of millennials upon beloved canon. Bridget, however, is confined to our modern era and our cultural norms. Once consumed with anxiety about her weight and clothing, Zellweger’s Bridget is still occasionally pajama-clad and disheveled, and indulgent in her sexual habits and her eating (Mad About the Boy has plenty of white wine and marshmallows to go around). But there’s a refinement to Zellweger’s performance that comes from age and expertise. In Bridget Jones’s Baby, there was a presumed absurdity to 40-something Bridget attending a music festival, glamping and wading through the mud. Here, she suffers few indignities of age; she is comfortable with what she is, perhaps, if not still unhappy. These films don’t remain interesting in spite of her growing older; they remain interesting because of it.

So long as the films’ regulars continue to play these parts with affection and grace, there’s no reason why we can’t check in with Bridget Jones every five to ten years going forward. The series has never been just about the people in it, but also the world they occupy. Mad About the Boy is “about” Bridget Jones in as much as her name comes before the colon in the title, but it is also concerned with the degradation of news journalism and private-school parent cliques and cosmetic adjustments. These films are social texts because Bridget is a social person: She cares, she thinks, she writes in her diary. Like with any old friend that goes 20 years back, Bridget’s “same old, same old” will always be interesting — in fact, it might even feel new.

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