Yahoo Lifestyle ‘Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy’ Review: Renée Zellweger Charms in What Feels Like a Sweetly Romantic but Mild Finale
In the mid-2010s, there was a funny Twitter account called @ModernSeinfeld, which floated ideas for “Seinfeld” episodes as if the show had lasted into the 21st century. (Sample episode: “Jerry’s GF texts in the movies but acts like it’s okay because she sits in the last row.”) At this point, you could almost imagine devising something similar for Bridget Jones, the winsomely discombobulated London singleton who first appeared, in the novel “Bridget Jones’s Diary,” back in 1996. I’m thinking of potential movie comedies like “Bridget Jones: Love Me Tinder,” “Bridget Jones: Last Brexit to Brooklyn,” and “Bridget Jones’s Old Tweets that Got Her Canceled.”
There’s a Tinder reference in the new Bridget Jones movie, “Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy,” along with japes about Harry Styles and lip serum that you buy on the dark web (it turns Bridget’s mouth into a faux-Kardashian swollen pucker). So you can hardly accuse the movie of being fatally out-of-date. The romantic liaison of the title takes place between Bridget, now in her early 50s, and a 29-year-old dreamboat biologist named Roxster (Leo Woodall) — and this, too, is an attempt to make the film au courant, since the real news about this May-December fling is how casual and “Why not?” it seems. (At least he’s not her intern.)
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That said, I wish “Mad About the Boy” took more aggressive fun in plugging Bridget into the fads and tropes of the present day. The movie, by design, has a sentimental middle-aged softness to it. It’s the first “Bridget Jones” movie to be released on a streaming platform (in this case, Peacock; that’s right, no theatrical in the U.S.), and it’s also the first one that feels like it belongs there. If Bridget can gallivant with a doe-eyed stud 25 years her junior, then surely she’d be up for the sort of wild and disheveled, drunken and crazy-stupid, delightfully embarrassing antics that powered the winningly debauched “Bridget Jones’s Diary” (2001), the criminally underrated “Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason” (2004), and the just-nutty-enough “Bridget Jones’s Baby” (2016). But that, alas, is not the kind of movie this is. It’s not another unhinged Bridget bash — more like a hearts-and-flowers finale.
Nine years ago, at the end of the last film, Bridget had a baby boy and married his father, her true love Mark Darcy (Colin Firth). But that happily ever after jumped the track. Bridget now has two children, William (Casper Knopf) and his little sister, Mabel (Mila Jankovic), but Mark has died; he was killed by an explosion in Sudan. The new film begins four years after his death, during which time Bridget has devoted herself to mourning and motherhood and not much else. She has abandoned the work force, quitting her job as a television producer. She has dated no one, and has had no desire to. Lost and out of sorts, she still has visions of Mark (he appears like a romantic ghost), and that’s a sign of how much she wishes she could go back to the perfect life she’d found.
“Mad About the Boy” is about how Bridget lurches herself out of her grief to rejoin the world, a journey that starts with the ebullient opening-credits sequence, in which she jumps up and down on the bed with her kids and lip-syncs to David Bowie’s “Modern Love.” Roxster, played as a sensitive Adonis by Leo Woodall (from “The White Lotus”), jump-starts her libido with no problem, and the two get along nicely. The question is, can it last?
There are other issues tucked into the movie’s side pockets, like how William misses his father so much that he’s become withdrawn. Or Bridget’s decision, based on advice from the redoubtable Dr. Rawlings (a whiplash-sharp Emma Thompson), to return to work, signing on as the producer of a talk show called “Better Women.” The morning after she first sleeps with Roxster, she comes into the studio with tousled hair and a dazed look, and one colleague after another asks, “Did you have sex last night?” When she finally confesses, in a fulsome outpouring of vintage Bridget TMI, it turns out that the entire studio audience has witnessed her speech (they break into applause). That’s worth a giggle, but it’s just about the only outrageous moment in the movie.
“Mad About the Boy” is wistful, melancholy, and sweetly (rather than screwballishly) romantic, which lends it a pleasing sincerity. It feels very much like it’s the finale of the series, and if that proves to be the case it brings this beloved heroine to a fitting place of closure. Zellweger’s performance is pure Bridget, all eager self-doubt, though in an older, wiser, and more charmingly responsible way. When she meets Mr. Wallaker (Chiwetel Ejiofor), the science teacher at William’s school, he’s so diffident that we’re not at all sure this is meant to blossom into anything. But Ejiofor’s sly performance is one of the film’s more effective tricks, as is the slow-groove evolution of this brain-meets-reformed-ditz romance. Hugh Grant is on hand as Daniel, the venerable modelizer who calls Bridget “Jones,” and every moment of his acid-dipped cynicism is welcome. “Mad About the Boy,” however, is more touching than bracing. It’s got everything you want in a “Bridget Jones” movie but the madness.
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