There is something rather affecting about growing up and growing older alongside a fictional character. Particularly when, unlike the aspiration Barbies of Sex and the City, that character is permitted to show the inevitable wear-and-tear of being a middle-aged mum of two. Checking in with familiar faces – Jesse and Céline from Richard Linklater’s Before movies, for example; or in this case, Bridget Jones and her disreputable band of booze buddies – feels somehow more cherishable when those faces reflect the same rough patches and tough times we all endure.
It has been nearly a quarter of a century since Renée Zellweger first stumbled on to our screens as the gauche, accident-prone klutz Bridget Jones. And, in common with the core friendships that define us, our relationship with the character has evolved and deepened. The 2001 Bridget of Bridget Jones’s Diary was an insecure hot mess fuelled by vat-sized glasses of house white (or “party petrol” as Sally Phillips’s Shazza pithily describes it). Today’s Bridget achieved her happy-ever-after fairytale ending. She married Mark Darcy (Colin Firth), had two adorable kids and moved barely a yoga mat’s distance from Hampstead Heath, only to have it all snatched away. Mark, we learn, was killed while on a humanitarian mission in Sudan.
Four years on, Bridget is older, wiser, sharper, funnier and marginally less dependent on pratfalls to deliver laughs. All of which means that this, the fourth film in the series based on Helen Fielding’s beloved creation, is the most satisfying and unexpectedly touching Jones outing since the first movie.
British director Michael Morris, best known for the American indie drama To Leslie, which earned an Oscar nomination for Andrea Riseborough, takes over the reins of the franchise from Sharon Maguire (Bridget Jones’s Diary; Bridget Jones’s Baby) and Beeban Kidron (The Edge of Reason), demonstrating slick comic timing and an affinity for Bridget’s trademark combination of supreme awkwardness and goofy extraversion. This is a woman who never saw a tinselly Christmas tree ornament that couldn’t be repurposed as a pair of earrings. Here, she’s putting a brave face on her bereavement and raising her two children to cherish their father’s memory but not be overwhelmed by it.
The kids are thriving, give or take a bit of preteen angst, but Bridget looks as though she’s showering in gin when she showers at all, spends most of the day in her pyjamas and is barely holding it together. The film’s skittish editing and agitated camera capture the low-level panic and barely controlled chaos of running the daily lives of two eccentric primary school kids. A pep talk from her no-nonsense gynaecologist Dr Rawlings (a gloriously acidic turn from Emma Thompson) prompts Bridget to get back to work as a TV producer on a daytime chat show (the film rather glosses over the financial realities of the past four years). A well-meaning friend stages a Tinder-vention and gets Bridget on to the apps and back into the dating pool.
Romantic options include the much younger Roxster (One Day’s Leo Woodall, gamely permitting himself to be well and truly objectified in the name of comedy). Then there’s Mr Wallaker (Chiwetel Ejiofor), Bridget’s son Billy’s new science teacher. Mr Wallaker is intimidatingly outdoorsy and is rather too fond of fascistic whistleblowing and barking orders at small children. But there’s a spark between Bridget and the teacher that is kindled during a rain-sodden outward bound trip.
Ultimately, though, while we’re invested in the idea of Bridget getting her second chance at a happy ending, it’s the film’s returning characters rather than the new ones that deliver heart and humour. Most welcome is Hugh Grant’s raffish Daniel Cleaver, who was missing, presumed dead, for most of the last film, 2016’s Bridget Jones’s Baby. It’s a role that Grant wears as easily as one of Daniel’s dashing blazers, pouring incorrigible charm into every wildly inappropriate line. But the screenplay (by Fielding, Dan Mazer and Abi Morgan) is smart enough to let Daniel grow and even mature slightly as a character. A scene in which he muses on their enduring friendship packs an unexpected emotional wallop.
Not everything flows. You suspect that a subplot might have been lost along the way: Isla Fisher is introduced as a glamorous neighbour whose no-fucks-given parenting style Bridget admires from afar. But then Fisher disappears from the film, never to be acknowledged again. It’s a curious decision that disrupts the storytelling a little. For the most part, though, this reunion with Bridget is a joy. Like a big old glass of pub wine, it might not be particularly complex or sophisticated but, my goodness, it hits the spot.
In UK and Irish cinemas
