Forget about anything as trivial as a bad day.
Bridget Jones is having a bad life.
She's 32 years old, single with no relationship prospects, stuck in a nowhere job at a publishing company, a little overweight and a lot more over-anxious.
In a drunken New Year resolution, Bridget vows not only to change her life, but to record the forward and backward steps she takes in pursuit of her goal. Thank heavens for Bridget Jones's Diary.
It's another one of those clever, witty, insightful relationship comedies that the British seem so very adept at turning out.
For a moment forget that the acting is stellar and the direction sprightly.
None of this would have mattered without a zinger of a screenplay.
Helen Fielding, who wrote the bestselling novels Bridget Jones's Diary and Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, collaborated with Richard Curtis, the screenwriter of Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, Blackadder and Mr. Bean.
They got a little additional help from Andrew Davies, who proved with The Tailor of Panama, Circle of Friends and the BBC series Pride and Prejudice that he can weave a plot laced with satire, romance and melodrama and still make it seem as plausible as it is entertaining.
Fielding's great characters, Curtis' witty dialogue and Davis' mastery of plot. You can't ask for much more.
Well, maybe you can.
You can ask that Renee Zellweger play the downtrodden but ever optimistic Bridget, and that Hugh Grant play the devilish rotter Daniel Cleaver and Colin Firth the emotionally corseted barrister Mark Darcy.
It's a romantic triangle made in casting heaven. Zellweger uses all her quirky mannerisms to maximum effect. She squints and pouts and waddles rather than walks.
You guessed it. She's that awkward duckling who never quite became a swan.
At one point, Darcy remarks that he likes Bridget just the way she is and truer sentiments were never expressed.
You simply wouldn't want Bridget to be anyone but the obsessive, klutzy, bumbling woman Zellweger makes her.
It's easy to see why Bridget could alienate people but it's equally easy to see why she could entrance them once they got to know her even a little. It's a milestone performance for Zellweger deserving of a landslide of accolades and awards. Much has been made of Zellweger's doing a Robert DeNiro by gaining as much as 30 lb. Far from making her look fat and unattractive, the weight makes her look sexy and voluptuous.
It's just that Bridget doesn't know how to display her ample charms.
She dresses so inappropriately and has such ghastly posture that she looks dumpy.
There's no vanity in this performance.
At first, Grant seems to be recycling his charming, witty persona but it doesn't take long for Cleaver's real personality to emerge.
He's an unconscionable Lothario, a unredeemable rogue. Grant is a master at undercutting an insult, almost making it seem clever rather than hurtful. It's a wonderful comic performance that is strategically balanced by Firth's prissy, haughty, repressed Darcy.
When Cleaver and Darcy finally come to blows over Bridget, the result is one of the funniest fight sequences on celluloid because it is so not Jackie Chan, Clint Eastwood or John Wayne.
As with Notting Hill and Four Weddings and a Funeral, Bridget Jones's Diary boasts unforgettable supporting characters from Bridget's drinking buddies to her parents.
Sharon Maguire's direction is as loopy and spunky as her heroine and she's put together a soundtrack that is as clever and appropriate as Zellweger's dead-on British accent.
Bridget Jones's Diary is a wickedly funny ode to incurable romantics wherever they might live, love and lose.
(More on: Bridget Jones's Diary).
(This film is rated AA)
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