Everything 'Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy' Gets Right About Grief
There’s a scene early on in Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy, the latest and final outing for Renée Zellweger’s diarist, when our heroine shares that her beloved dad Colin (played by Jim Broadbent) has died (don’t worry it’s literally revealed before the opening credits roll). There is a scene between the father and daughter in hospital, with Bridget sitting by his bedside while someone takes a photo of them together. My own father died last June and I have an eerily similar photo of the two of us in the hospital. I’m guessing a tremendous number of people have the same photo. And so the tears began. I was crying before the opening title sequence.
I didn’t take tissues to the film; it’s Bridget Jones, a comedy about a hapless singleton with a fondness for big knickers, why would you? And so in the dark I wiped my tears away with my sleeve. I continued to do this throughout the film because, once I’d opened the seal, I found I couldn’t stop crying. Of course, the film is full of laughs. Hugh Grant (surprise! He’s back!) is on excellent form delivering rude one liners and teaching Bridget’s son how to make a ‘dirty bitch martini’, and Emma Thompson is brilliant as Bridget’s no-nonsense gynaecologist/reluctant therapist. But at its heart, Mad About the Boy is really a film about grief.
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Most of us know by now that the movie begins four years after the death of Bridget’s husband Mark Darcy (Colin Firth), killed while on a humanitarian mission in Sudan. And so Bridget tells us: 'Life has its light notes, and life has its dark notes'. The most heartbreaking part, for me, is the cheery face Bridget puts on when others ask how she is doing. The mask barely hides her obvious and continued devastation.
Bridget is now a fifty-something single mother raising two small children and her friends want her to get back out on the dating scene. And so we are treated to Bridget dipping her toe into the world of apps, an affair with a much younger man (Leo Woodall), and a flirtation with a teacher (Chiwetel Ejiofor) at her kids’ school.
But amidst these funny hijinks lies a very real question: how do you move on in life, while also remembering and cherishing the past?
It’s not surprising that the emotional aftermath of widowhood is so well played out. Helen Fielding’s husband Kevin Curran, with whom she shared two children, died in 2016, three years after she published the book Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy. Fielding and Curran had split a few years earlier but, as one of three screenwriters for the movie, Fielding no doubt used her own experience to shape Bridget in the film version. And it’s not only about Bridget moving on, it also touches on how children deal with grief, which we particularly see in her son Billy’s ongoing trauma at losing his father.
This week Fielding told The Sunday Times, 'We have a saying in our family: "Don’t get too #deathy". I’m always reluctant to be too personal but the children’s father did die and he wrote for The Simpsons, so no joke was too dark to make. That made me see you don’t have to sit around feeling sorry for your loss. People still stay the same person when something bad happens.'
Indeed, Bridget remains Bridget. I hope I’m not making the film sound too depressing, you will honestly have a hoot. But the reason why it packs such a punch is this ‘light’ and ‘dark’ that Bridget speaks of.
Watching the film I also felt a sense of grief for my own life, too. Now 42, married, with a young child, I had first watched the original Bridget Jones film in a cinema in New York in 2001. I was travelling after finishing secondary school and Bridget’s life in London - flat in Borough Market, vodka-soaked nights out, love triangles - looked so exciting to my 18-year-old self. On seeing this latest iteration, I realised that the part of my life I had so looked forward to at 18 — namely being a single career girl in the capital — was now all over. It went by in the blink of an eye. Many of us have grown up with Bridget, and as we say goodbye to her it is almost impossible not to look inward, at our own character arcs in the same time period. The filmmakers know this too, and play up the nostalgia between Bridget and her friends in one of the closing scenes. 'We’ve had some fucking fun though, haven’t we?' asks Shazza (Sally Phillips), as the audience is pressed to take stock of their own journeys.
Tissues. Take tissues. My sleeves were ruined.
Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy is out in UK cinemas now.
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