Pleasing and effective comedy about the ups and downs of seeking love.

Rating: 6/10 (22 July 2018)

They say that if a man is not a socialist by the time he is twenty, then he has no heart, and that if he is not a conservative by the time he is forty, then he has no brain. So far as I can tell, "Bridget Jones' Diary" depicts not a man but a woman who falls somewhere in-between both these two particular ages and, as a bonus, these two somewhat rudimentary world outlooks. While not a particularly political film, it is interesting to note how it seems to push the message that men and women are better together, and that individualism and empowerment is all well and good, but will ultimately lead to loneliness.
Texas-born actress Renée Zellweger plays the eponymous Bridget Jones, a desk-jockey in a plush London office belonging to a publishing firm. She is single; 32 years of age and desperate for a man in her life as yet another New Year's ticks by- bellowing out the lyrics to "All by Myself" after a day's slog, complete with all the drum and cymbal actions right on cue, to emphasise the point. Despite this, Jones is not lonely in the technical sense - she has a large group of contacts and acquaintances: her friends are an assortment of homosexuals and liberal metropolitans; her parents, played by Jim Broadbent and Gemma Jones, eventually become separate shoulders to cry on, while at the office, there is her boss Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant), to whom she takes a fancy.
The film makes some effort to point out as to how Jones has been living life fairly liberally: she smokes; falls drunk out of taxi cabs after nights out; has neglected her diet over the years and has placed a lot of effort and energy into her career in order to be where she is - there are not many people in jobs, after all, who might be able to rub shoulders with both Salman Rushdie AND Jeffery Archer at a function. Much later on in the film, there is a scene involving Jones having to do some actual cooking from original ingredients - the likes of which comes as totally alien to her, inferring a complete lack of skill in this department. This is something which would not have been the case for her previous generation, the likes of whom kept the homestead.
The film depicts Jones seemingly want to break from most of this, and has her set about tidying up her life through a manner of ways which predominantly revolve around shedding her liberal skin - depicting the events amusingly in the titular diary, with her optimum goal being the obtaining of a man. Working with books for all her life, she is therefore afforded a degree of comedic prose with which to construct her entries.
There are two men in her life who have the greatest potential of filling her life's largest chasm: one of them, and despite having already identified him as being somebody who embodies all that's wrong with men, is Cleaver. The other is a barrister and an old family friend played by Colin Firth called Mark Darcy, whose good looks the film feels need confirming to us early on by two women during a private conversation and whose paddling pool Jones happened to play around naked in when they were eight. Playfully, the film affords Cleaver and Darcy an antagonistic history in that one once slept with the other's fiancé.
I was struck by just how passionate the film feels about its central message, that of how men and women are happier together and that love, it would seem, conquers all. At the time of the film being made, female employment actually outnumbered male employment in the United Kingdom for the first time in history. Feminism had found a happy place in society, allowing women to possess their own freedoms and careers - free from feeling ashamed about their bodies and allowing them to have relationships with co-workers on top of whatever else.

I'm not sure the film is necessarily taking a stand against much of this, and in its heroine, it has somebody who embodies these philosophies better than most, but it treads dangerously close to a line the other side of which commends monogamy; married life and things like pride in appearance: items which you might say are/were anathema to many of those who helped Labour to their landslide win at around the exact same time the source material for this film was conceived.
Certainly, by the end, the film has depicted more than just Bridget Jones turning her life around: Jones' mother, in actual fact, goes in the opposite direction - describing herself as living in the "winter" of her life and admitting that, if she'd had a second chance, would not have even bothered with having children. Being more liberal in old age, she leaves her husband for another man. There is even room for an otherwise irrelevant narrative about a Kurdish man who escapes illegal deportation and thanks the heavens he has had a wife by his side all this time. The manner about which these supporting strands eventually unfold only seem to serve to reinforce my belief that the film is about how human beings do better as twosomes.
Aside all things, the film is often just terrifically funny: moments such as the montage of job interviews Jones undergoes cannot help but make you laugh, whereas her desperate attempt to provide a speech at a book launch with the equipment not fully functional works on more than just the singular level. From the point of view of straight up genre film-making, the film ticks enough boxes. "Bridget Jones' Diary" has spawned two sequels, neither of which I have seen, but will certainly hunt down - I would recommend this particular entry besides.