Bridget Jones is Mad About the Boy

Love her or hate her, Bridget Jones is back on the big screen. American actress Renée Zellweger reprises her role as the inimitable romantic heroine in Mad About the Boy. It is the fourth film in the series based on the novels by British author Helen Fielding. The first book, Bridget Jones’s Diary, heralded the era of chick lit, resonating with a generation of professional young women. Published in 1996, it chronicles the life of the titular Bridget Jones as she navigates life in London as a thirty-something single woman. Bridget worries about everything: her weight, her habits, her career and, above all, her love life. Scores of women recognised themselves in the tragic yet loveable heroine and the book became a bestseller. The Bridget Jones phenomenon introduced a whole new lexicon*, including ‘singletons’, ‘smug marrieds’, ‘fuckwittage’, that tied in with 1990s culture and was adopted in everyday speech.

Bridget Grows up

The cast of characters introduced in the first book include Bridget’s close friends Shazzer, Jude and Tom, her domineering mother, her soft-hearted father, her sleazy boss Daniel Cleaver and the mysterious Mark Darcy. However, despite a ‘happy ever after’, it was inevitable that Bridget would return. Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason was published in 1999, focusing on a theoretically more mature Bridget in a stable relationship and career. The final instalment, Mad About the Boy, came out in 2013. All have been adapted into blockbuster movies, with an additional film, Bridget Jones’s Baby, based on a screenplay co-authored by Fielding. Mad About the Boy premieres in cinemas on Valentine’s Day. In an interview about the film, Fielding began by explaining where Bridget finds herself at this point in her life.

Helen Fielding (English accent): Bridget is now a mother. And parenthood for Bridget now becomes another thing she thinks she’s supposed to be really good at, and now she thinks she’s really crap at. But I think the essential thing with Bridget and her children is, it’s a terrible muddle. She does forget them sometimes and leave them on the pavement. She does sometimes worry that they’ll be taken into care by the social services. But essentially, she loves them.

Jane Austen Influence

The name of the children’s father, Mark Darcy, is no coincidence. The novels and the movies contain references to the works of Jane Austen. Bridget Jones’s Diary alludes to Pride and Prejudice, while The Edge of Reason roughly follows the plot of Persuasion. British actor Colin Firth played Mr. Darcy in the BBC serialisation of Pride and Prejudice, before he played Mark Darcy in the Bridget Jones films. Fellow Brit Hugh Grant has also appeared in the movie adaptation of Sense and Sensibility. In Mad About the Boy, he returns as the deliciously ambiguous Daniel Cleaver.

Helen Fielding: I love Daniel as a character. Well, I also love Hugh as a character. And I think Hugh contributed a huge amount to the funny lines in the movies. For example, the line in the movie where he’s seducing Bridget and she’s wearing the big pants and he goes, “Oh, don’t worry, I’m wearing something rather similar myself. Oh, Mummy!” That came from him. So, I really wanted to keep him present and he’s godfather to Bridget’s children. The thing about Daniel is, I think people do stay in people’s lives and old boyfriends do become friends. And you know, he’s still Daniel. He’s still, “What colour are your panties?” And still, you know, having a crack at seduction whenever it presents itself. But he’s still in her life. And they accept each other as they are.

A Familiar Favourite

Despite now being a fifty-something mother of two children, Bridget is also largely unchanged. She is still wracked by self-doubt, questioning her own worth in every aspect of her life. It does not sound much like comedy, but Fielding says she endeavoured to make it incredibly funny and relatable.

Helen Fielding: Bridget is constantly resolving to change, but I don’t think anyone ever really changes, do they? I think she’s still got the same sense of wild optimism, followed by despair. So, one minute, she’s, “Oh, I’m marvellous, I’m a sex goddess,” and then, next minute, she sees a poster for an over-fifties trip to Hastings, and then she starts to think she’s an old lady, with a shopping bag and a tight perm. So, she goes from one extreme to the other. But the thing is, she’s always got her friends. That’s the thing. And she’s always got her friends to make her laugh about stuff.

Life and Loss

The third book, and fourth film, are considerably darker than their prequels. Without disclosing too many spoilers, Bridget is in mourning over the loss of a major character. Fielding explains this sombre turn of events.

Helen Fielding: No one gets to Bridget’s age without suffering some sort of loss. Life doesn’t turn out like you expect. And the thing about Bridget is, the comedy has always come from something real and I didn’t want this book to be a weak copy of the other books. The thing about Bridget is, her motto is ‘KBO’: “keep buggering on”. Tough things happen in life and she gets through. She survives, she has a friend, she deals with it and she comes through the other side and she’s still finding things funny and it hurts, but she’s still laughing. And that was something important that I wanted to say.

Ageing Gracefully

Fielding has another point to make about media’s obsession with youth and beauty. Mad About the Boy is unusual in having a middle-aged female protagonist. The author used the book and the screenplay, which she also co-authored, to address some serious issues relating to female stereotypes. 

Helen Fielding: There will always be stereotypes. And when I wrote the first book, I was in my thirties and the stereotype was that if you weren’t married, you were a tragic, barren spinster, who was going to end up dying alone and being eaten by an Alsatian. And all your uncles would ask you how your love life was. And now I think that the stereotype that Bridget’s struggling with is that of a woman of a certain age. And she thinks she’s that woman who refuses ever to come out into daylight and spends her whole time in darkened rooms, with candles and firelight and then smears her lipstick all over her face, because she can’t see, because she needs reading glasses. There’s a lot of very unkind stereotypes for women in their forties and fifties, sitcom characters who are deluded into thinking they’re still attractive, but they’re not. And I think it’s really mean. And I think we need some better, more realistic.