[COLUMN] Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy is the Rare Legacyquel With Something to Say | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece contains spoilers for the premise of Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, which is streaming on Peacock now and is surprisingly good. It is also in cinemas internationally.

It is very easy to be cynical about Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy. The first movie in the series, Bridget Jones’ Diary, was a broadly enjoyable piece of fluff elevated by one of the greatest fight sequences in the history of British cinema. The two sequels, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason and Bridget Jones’ Baby, were forgettable at the very best. However, Mad About the Boy manages to be the rare romantic comedy sequel – and the rare modern legacyquel – to validate its existence.

Romantic comedies are a difficult genre to franchise. After all, the default ending for a mainstream crowd-pleasing studio comedy is “happily ever after”, with the two romantic leads getting together and spending the rest of their lives together. It is very hard to craft a satisfying follow-up where even the illusion of a “will they?”/“won’t they?” tension has been answered by “they did.” This is why Julia Roberts and Richard Gere made Runaway Bride rather than Pretty Woman 2.

This was the problem with the first two Bridget Jones sequels. “The question is: what happens after you walk off into the sunset?” Bridget (Renée Zellweger) asks near the start of The Edge of Reason, and neither that film nor Bridget Jones’ Baby can provide a particularly compelling answer. Bridget ends up with Mark (Colin Firth) at the end of the very first Bridget Jones film, and it is immediately very clear that this is where she is meant to be.

As such, the two sequels lack any real tension. A plot keeps threatening to happen in The Edge of Reason. Bridget thinks that she is pregnant, but it’s fine because she isn’t. Following a deeply stupid argument with Mark, Bridget almost sleeps with his romantic rival and her ex-boyfriend Daniel (Hugh Grant), but it’s fine because she doesn’t. Bridget Jones’ Baby goes a step further by having Bridget and Daniel separate before the start of the movie, but they inevitably reunite by the end.

Mad About the Boy works because it understands that there is no tension left to be wrung from the relationship between Bridget and Mark. They love each other. They are happy together. They are married. They have two beautiful children together, Mabel (Mila Jankovic) and Billy (Casper Knopf). Their shared life seems perfect. At least, it was, until Mark died tragically in Sudan while working on human rights law, leaving Bridget a widow caring for their two children alone.

Mark is not the only character to be killed off before the opening title drop. Bridget pauses for a moment to remember the last days that she spent with her father (Jim Broadbent) in hospice care, sneaking him sausages. “It’s not enough to survive,” her father urges Bridget from his bed. “I want you to live.” All of this happens before the credits appear, with Bridget taking her father’s advice to heart as David Bowie’s “Modern Love”, imbuing the romantic comedy with an earnest profundity.

This is the boldest swing in Mad About the Boy, and it is a choice that really pays off. Part of this is because Mark’s absence feels more like a character and storytelling choice than a contractual dispute. Firth actually appears in a couple of very effective scenes of the movie, as a ghost haunting his family – a memory of something lost. It lends Mad About the Boy a weight that is unusual for a romantic comedy, which is a big gamble for a film franchise defined by a set of large knickers. It could easily veer into treacly nonsense.

Somehow, it works. The opening twenty minutes of Mad About the Boy, as the film settles into its groove, are honestly breathtaking, as it becomes clear how thoughtfully and skillfully the film has committed to its narrative and thematic choices. There is an early scene in Bridget’s kitchen, as the character is haunted by the voices of past and present friends offering conflicting advice, which is easily the most technically ambitious piece of filmmaking in the entire franchise. Unlike the previous two sequels, Mad About the Boy not only knows what it is doing, but also how best to do it.

More to the point, this somber reflectiveness imbues the film’s nostalgia with a profundity often lacking from these sorts of nostalgic cash-ins. The film opens on the fourth anniversary of Mark’s death, with Bridget attending a dinner similar to the one from the first film, populated by familiar characters like Cosmo (Mark Lingwood) and Woney (Dolly Wells) from the first film, who badger Bridget about the difficulty of being a single woman in modern London just like they did in the first film.

These familiar elements are not treated as triumphant fanservice. The movie doesn’t wallow in doing “the thing from the thing.” Instead, there is something deeply sad and even angry about this repetition. Bridget came so far from that dinner table conversation with those people all those years ago, and the fact that she has found herself back at that table with those people discussing that topic isn’t funny. It’s sad. Her life was supposed to be different, but it’s been reset to zero. In Bridget Jones’ Diary, that dinner led to the first tender scene between Bridget and Mark, so the repetition here only emphasizes his absence.

Whereas most nostalgic legacyquels emphasize the vitality and the energy of their leads, insisting that they have not lost a step in the intervening decades by pretending that these older characters should be delighted to be stuck in a perpetual second act, Mad About the Boy understands that this is the last place that Bridget wanted to find herself. She has already done all of this. She reached the end of the story, and now she has to start over. “Bridget, are you all right?” her doctor (Emma Thompson) asks. Bridget replies, honestly, “No!”

There is a strong melancholy that runs through Mad About the Boy. Daniel is still the dirty rotten scoundrel that he was all those years ago, but he has grown up a little bit. He is now “Uncle Daniel” to Mabel and Billy, babysitting them and teaching them to make cocktails and cheat at cards. Halfway through the film, Daniel passes out and is rushed to hospital. He is diagnosed with a heart murmur. Panicking, he realizes that Bridget is the closest thing that he has to “next of kin.” He tried to repair his relationship with his estranged son, Enzo (Alessandro Bedetti).

There is a sense of the passage of time in Mad About the Boy. Obviously, all the movie stars look beautiful.  Zellweger, Grant and Firth are all very pretty people, as is new addition Chiwetel Ejiofor. However, they are appreciably older. One wonders if this is a conscious choice on the part of the filmmakers or simply a consequence of a modest budget and high-definition cameras, but these movie star faces are defined by lines and wrinkles, weathered by the years.

Grant in particular has aged out his pretty-boy youth and into something just a little closer to a character actor, the lines on his face suggesting something thoughtful beneath the disarming exterior that he himself described as “Mr. Stuttery Blinkey.” Firth has aged from the smoldering hunk who emerged from the water in Pride & Prejudice to a thoughtful Oscar-winning actor. Even the scars on Ejiofor’s forehead seem more pronounced than they did in his more youthful roles. 

Mad About the Boy makes all of the silly jokes that one might expect from a sequel about a single mother getting back on the dating scene. Bridget downloads Tinder. She gets herself a toyboy, Roxster (Leo Woodall). She tries modern cosmetics. However, the film is also consistently sincere. On their first date, Roxster takes Bridget to his favorite part of London. He asks if she knows it, and she replies, “I used to.” When Roxster asks if he can kiss her, Bridget smiles at the thought of “a generation that asks.”

The film is also endearingly kind to its characters. While Bridget Jones’ Diary and The Edge of Reason were undoubtedly charmed by Daniel’s bad boy antics, Mad About the Boy finds some warmth and humanity lurking beneath his devil-may-care exterior. When Bridget’s romance with Roxster inevitably falls through, the film is tender with and sympathetic to both characters. It’s heartening to watch a major studio movie that is mostly about the idea that people are fundamentally nice, even if their desires come into conflict.

The odd gentleness at the heart of the fourth film might be rooted in the premature death of Kevin Curran, the ex-husband of Bridget Jones author Helen Fielding and the father to her own two children. However, whether deliberately or not, it is also tapped into something deeper. As the chyrons on the news coverage point out, Mark would have died at the height of the pandemic. The scenes with Bridget’s father in a hospital bed cannot help but evoke that collective trauma. It’s a romantic comedy about the aftermath of unimaginable loss.

While neither British nor American pop culture has really directly engaged with the pandemic, it is interesting that their indirect approaches should be so different. Between Doctor Who and Mad About the Boy, British popular culture seems preoccupied with confronting the grief and loss of what happened. In contrast, American popular culture like Teacup or Paradise treats grief as a secondary concern behind paranoia and claustrophobia. However, it’s probably too early to draw conclusions.

For the fourth entry in a film franchise about the troubled sex life of a British news producer, Mad About the Boy is surprisingly poetic in its visuals. Every year, Bridget and her children celebrate Mark’s birthday by writing letters to the deceased patriarch, tying them to balloons and releasing them into the sky over London. It’s a potent visual metaphor for grief, just like the white owl that perches outside the children’s bedroom at the start of the movie and only lifts in its closing moments.

Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy is a surprisingly tender and thoughtful take on the classic romantic comedy, one of the rare long-delayed sequels that feels like it has something meaningful to say both about its characters and about this specific moment. It is easily the best of these four films.