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This page provides snippets from a selection of reviews of Paul's first major main-stream film, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason.
Britain's best-known twittering hamster is back, doing her trademark blonde pout on every billboard in the land: one part Marilyn to three parts Kenneth Williams. Renée Zellweger's Bridget Jones has become one of the more likable roles of her career. The accent is eccentric but consistent, and the Bridget films have thankfully never pandered to nasty American humour targeting British teeth. What is most impressive about Renée's Bridge is her very plausible, capillary-distressed British skin. Not the traditional A-lister's undifferentiated honey-bronze sheen, but a skin redolent of brisk walks and camping holidays, undertaken in inclement weather.
Bridget is now a successful if chaotic cable TV presenter and she's got her Mr Right: Mark Darcy, the uptight human rights barrister with a heart and, indeed, bank account of gold, played by Colin Firth. They've been together for a couple of months; he sleeps over at her flat and every night they shag for England, although she doesn't get to come to his flash townhouse - and there's a certain gorgeous twentysomething hanging about him that Bridget doesn't like the look of.
But the question in all our minds is: when, when, oh when, is Hugh Grant coming on? Because this movie's big plus is its big minus and it's exactly the same as the first time. Hugh Grant is far and away the best thing in it and when he comes on, the enjoyment factor advances with a great swoosh. His Daniel Cleaver, as exquisitely groomed and tailored as ever, is now improbably employed as a travel presenter on the same channel, popping up in Rome and dismissing the Sistine Chapel as "poof interior design gone bonkers", and then sashaying around the Serpentine Gallery offering his reactionary but perceptive views on John Currin.
The station naturally suggests that he and Bridge team up. Bridget is scornful but it isn't long before the old black magic cranks into life with the movie cheekily reminding us that he and Bridget have enjoyed anal love, and playfully implying that this is not an intimacy that Mark Darcy has enjoyed. Daniel claims to Bridget that he is now in group therapy for his sex addiction: "I hug people who smell."
I would have liked to see those scenes, but maybe they were a bit too much like About a Boy. In a spirit of if-it-ain't-broke-why-fix-it, Beeban Kidron's sequel reprises almost everything that worked in the first film, including Mark and Daniel's girlie jumper-pulling fight, but peps up the action with foreign location-work: a stopover in a ski-ing resort (unfunny) and a women's prison in Bangkok (quite funny). It's all part of the strange unreality of the Bridget universe, conceived in the distant 1990s, when relationships were the most important thing in the world. Entertaining stuff, mostly, but Hugh Grant is absent for ages and ages, and without him it's just not the same.
Reviewer's Rating:
Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason continues where the 2001 Bridget Jones's Diary left off, and it rambles like a diary or a series of comic sketches in a TV show. Bridget (Renée Zellweger), having escaped the clutches of the womanising charmer Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant), has become a TV reporter and the lover of rich, reticent civil rights lawyer Mark Darcy (Colin Firth). They've been together for six weeks, and have enjoyed, as the eponymous diarist tells us, '71 ecstatic shags'. In a parody of the opening of The Sound of Music, she imagines herself and Darcy prancing together on the green pastures of Parliament Hill on Hampstead Heath.
But all is not well. An opening credit sequence sees Bridget reporting on the sport of skydiving. After hesitating at the plane's door, she lands heavily in a sty of rutting pigs. Her very incompetence has made her a TV celebrity and she remains as naive, overweight, self-pitying, and resolution-breaking as ever. She makes an idiot of herself suspecting that Darcy is having an affair and goes with him to a Law Society dinner in a hideous dress and inappropriate make-up, and commits every kind of social gaffe.
What is it then that makes this female version of Mr Bean or Norman Wisdom so apparently appealing? It's partly because the audience knows that beneath the plump Bridget there is the svelte Renée Zellweger, an authentic Hollywood star putting on both weight and an English accent for our benefit. The effect wouldn't be the same with Lisa Tarbuck in the role, though one suspects the film's feminist director, Beeban Kidron, might have preferred that. It's also the Cinderella story of the neglected misfit winning the prince by getting her size-eight foot into a size-five glass slipper.
But the real explanation must be that even after three decades or more of feminism, many women still identify with the lonely (despite the gaggle of devoted friends), self-doubting, socially inadequate and physically uncomfortable Bridget. And they long for romantic fulfilment with and subsequent marriage to an improbably dashing but also kind, rich and successful man. The film's liberation resides more in its feisty language and permissive attitude towards sex than in its sexual politics.
These underlying feel-bad emotions are transformed into a feel-good experience in the cinema by a soundtrack of wall-to-wall golden oldies (or bronze oldies in many cases) that lifts the spirits. There is a remarkable shot, accompanied by a sad romantic song, that begins by observing Bridget alone in her flat at night and draws back until we see a whole urban area dotted with windows framing happy couples in their cheerful homes.
The other strategy is to turn every scene of embarrassment and defeat into a triumph for Bridget. This is most evident in her excursion to Thailand as assistant to Grant's Daniel, who has become a star presenter of sexy tourist programmes, about which he receives a cute compliment from Jeremy Paxman. After rejecting his advances, she's tricked into transporting a ceramic souvenir full of cocaine, and on her arrest at the airport is deserted by the cowardly Daniel. Faced with 20 years in a Bangkok jail, she dissolves into self-pity before teaching her fellow inmates Madonna's 'Like a Virgin'. Naturally, Darcy intervenes with the help of cabinet members to release her. Lacking compassion or any hint of genuinely black humour, this prison sequence is tasteless (as opposed to being in authentic bad taste) and embarrassing. It is not half as squirm-making, however, as the re-affirmation in a dinky country church of Bridget's parents' wedding vows.
Maybe I'm outgrowing Richard Curtis' relationship dream. It's a lovely idea in theory but in practice it's decidedly fluffy. Love Actually seemed like such an original idea, but the result was nothing less than painful. No, Richard Curtis is a photocopier for British romantic comedy - but every copy is a little less sharp than the last.
This is the predicament that affects Edge of Reason. There are some true moments of revelation, but they're neither substantial enough nor inspired enough to touch the original.
The formula is the same: Bridget Jones, little older and a little fatter, is struggling with her relationship issues without realising that she has no relationship issues. Enter her group of similar malcontents (translation: her callous and desperately idiotic friends) who continue to reinforce her helplessness, getting her into every little bit of trouble she encounters.
On the other side, Mark Darcy, still stupidly proper and now, perhaps, even a little creepy, and Daniel Cleaver, still stupidly dirty and now, perhaps, even a little unnecessary. Two caricatures, if I've ever seen them, of what a man should be. It's difficult not to understand why the books are such huge draws, these two polar-opposite characters will cover every conceivable relationship - good or bad, but the entire script is whimsical fantasy.
If the first film had anything going for it, it was Renée Zellweger, whose roles prior had been indistinctive and forgettable. Bridget the second is every bit as loveably dense as her last incarnation, and Zellweger is responsible for the more inspired moments here, but at best she's a spoof of herself. She's been taken too far and it's not too long into the run that all interest dies.
Likewise, Hugh Grant's Cleaver was such a refreshing break from the norm in the first film, we were used to seeing him as a stiff-upper-lipped nice guy, but he's little more than set dressing this time around. He's as underused as he is overemphasised - the prototypical villain of the piece who exists solely to whisk Bridget off her feet and then drop her.
Since the lead cast are so inadequate, it's even more distressing to discover that the strong support is largely overlooked - Jim Broadbent and Gemma Jones were delightful as Bridget's parents in the first film and are, here, the source of some blissful giggles. Unfortunately, they're given five minutes scattered through the whole film - even relegated to the background as Bridget relives their gags from the original.
There are some wonderful laughs to be had, but they're few and far between. They serve not to make the film watchable, only to make it bearable.
Edge of Reason may be of interest to those fickle fans of the original that are looking for more-of-the-same, but the distinctly new moments of genius are far too thin-on-the-ground to encourage a more enthusiastic endorsement.
Reviewer's Rating:
(63%)
Renée Zellweger is a plus-size talent, but there is no fun to be had in watching her reprise the role of British "singleton" Bridget Jones in a consistently crass sequel that would have to go some to cut it as a bad American sitcom. Much has been made of Zellweger packing on twenty pounds. The stunt paid off in 2001's Bridget Jones's Diary because Zellweger, sporting a spot-on Brit accent, found the smarts and the sass in a self-hating reporter who learned to be comfortable in her own skin. The joke was on us for thinking otherwise.
In Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, based on Helen Fielding's feeble follow-up novel, the joke is all on Bridget. When she believes, falsely, that her lawyer love Mark Darcy (Colin Firth) is cheating, the face-stuffing commences: "Estimated weight," she writes in her diary, "4,000 pounds." Is it the clumsy script or the switch in directors -- Beeban Kidron in for Sharon Maguire -- that has sucked out the charm of the original and replaced it with crude pratfalls and enough shag gags to stuff the next three Austin Powers movies? Against all odds, Hugh Grant gets laughs as Daniel, the chubby-chaser with a fetish for Bridget's huge white panties. But by the time Bridget lands in a Thailand jail and joins a singalong with hookers who think the Madonna lyric is really "Like a virgin/Fucked for the very first time," the movie has degenerated into a desperate dung heap. Who knew the mirthless scene in which Bridget sky-dives into a pig sty would sum up the whole movie?
Reviewer's Rating:
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This Page created: 28 March, 2005
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