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| Genre: | Comedy |
| Year: | 2001 |
| Rating: | R |
| Length: | 1h 38mins |
| Cast: | Sharon Maguire, Renee Zellweger, Colin Firth, Hugh Grant |
Based on Helen Fielding's hugely popular novel, this romantic comedy follows Bridget (Renee Zellweger), a post-feminist, thirty-something British woman who has a penchant for alcoholic binges, smoking, and an inability to control her weight. While trying to keep these things in check and also deal with her job in publishing, she visits her parents for a Christmas party. They try to set her up with Mark (Colin Firth), the visiting son of one of their neighbors. Snubbed by Mark, she instead falls for her boss Daniel {Hugh Grant), a dashing lothario who begins to send her suggestive e-mails that soon lead to a dinner date proposition. Daniel reveals that he and Mark attended college together, during which time Mark had an affair with his fianc‚e. When Bridget finds Daniel cavorting with an American colleague, she decides to change her life with a new job as a TV presenter. At a dinner party, she bumps into Mark again, who expresses his affection for her; when Daniel claims he wants Bridget back, the two fight over who deserves her affections the most. Popular British performers Gemma Jones, Jim Broadbent, and Shirley Henderson appear in the supporting cast. Jason Clark
Many objected to Texan Ren‚e Zellweger's casting, but she more than does justice to the title British singleton in the film adaptation of Helen Fielding's cheeky Pride and Prejudice update Bridget Jones's Diary. Though co-scripters Fielding, Richard Curtis, and Andrew Davies do away with most of the novel's accounting of Bridget's calories, cigarettes, and alcohol, and sadly limit her friends' presence, they retain some of the book's wittiest Bridget-isms through voice-overs as well as dialogue. Director Sharon Maguire (Fielding's inspiration for "Shazzer") occasionally dwells too much on Bridget's humiliations on her way to romance, but Zellweger's performance overcomes the flaws. Famously sporting 20 extra pounds and a pitch-perfect suburban-London accent, Zellweger charmingly nails Bridget's comic self-loathing and sneakily confident sass, underlining why hunky Colin Firth and sexy Hugh Grant convincingly come to hilariously foppish blows over her. Having a humorous go at their own images, Firth's upstanding Mark Darcy resurrects his Pride and Prejudice Mr. Darcy smolder, while Grant's Daniel Cleaver is precisely not his usual stammering nice guy. Bridget may not be a feminist heroine for the 21st century, but Bridget Jones's Diary at least manages to be an increasingly rare bird: a clever romantic comedy. Lucia Bozzola
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