Er, I enjoyed it. (possible spoilers)

Rating: 6/10 (19 April 2001)

There is a telling scene in 'Bridget Jones' Diary', when the heroine's errant mother comes home to a husband dazed and directionless having been abandoned. Colin Jones has been set up as a model of dull decency on a par with Mark Darcy, and suggestive of why Bridget should prefer the latter's dogged solidity to Daniel Cleaver's caddish, fun, sexually explosive flibbertigibbet. Mum begs Dad to take her back, apologising for what she has done. Colin pauses and says he's not sure. Mum bursts into tears, before Colin laughs, hugs her and says he was only joking. good old dad.

He waited until she had debased herself as low as she could go, until she was grovelling, had ceded any power (the great lack that decided her adultery) and independence to him as he restores his self-dignity. It doesn't matter that he has treated her as a non-person for years, never mind not condescended to conubial favours. There is a steely cruelty in this rare gentleman, and the scene is revealing about why Bridget has ended up as she has; what she wants; and a possible fate in store for her if she chooses Mark.
people have complained that a film of this title has largely forsaken the diary format. This is not just a tired question of fidelity to text - by writing her life, Bridget takes control, shapes and interprets a seemingly chaotic, random, and failed existence. In a film where she is an objective player, if still the main one, she is likely to lose even this mediating power.
But the film we have here is not an 'objective', third-person story about a woman called Bridget Jones. Everything in the film is filtered through her subjectivity - every pleasure and humiliation made to seem better or worse that it is because SHE experiences it. In this way traumas like Salman Rushdie's ordeal, the racist treatment of refugees in Britain etc. all become reflections of Bridget's ego.
Cleverly, the film inverts the traditional male focus of Hollywood narrative. Normally it is the man who is given the choice between two types of women, the 'bad', sexually active one, and the good, more 'spiritual' one. Here it is the men who are types - and reduced to their types so they seem caricatures - and Bridget's sensibility which is whole and coherent.

Traditionally it is the male who seeks a good woman who will take him in hand, in effect mother him; as I have suggested, Bridget's uselessness at 'traditional' 'feminine' tasks (cooking etc.) means she needs a father figure; similarly, it is she who forces the resolution, who chases the love object, not the man. Just as Bridget in the book fixes a messy life, so it sit the film heroine's desires and goals that shape hers.
Ideological qualms aside (can't we see other Britains on film? etc.), 'Diary' is rather fun. Quite why any woman would want to exchange a funny, charming, articulate rascal for a mumbling plank I don't know, but I am assured by friends that I am wrong, and that Colin Firth is swoonsome. If you're looking for cinematic ingenuity, thematic density, an original story, or visual pleasure look elsewhere (Edward Yang, for instance...); if you want an amiable, undemanding film that passes the time, with cosy jokes and an excellent street brawl (loved it when caddish Cleaver fights back with a bin lid), than here you are. Renee Zellweger is, for once, hugely sympathetic, not just for being winningly game - complaints about being too 'posh' miss the crucial point that she is only posh in public situations, as befits a work based on Jane Austen.