PRISONERS OF LOVE : 'Bridget Jones's Diary' & 'The Widow of Saint-Pierre'. - Review - movie review

Commonweal, May 18, 2001 by Rand Richards Cooper

I lived in Germany for several years, and it almost destroyed me for romantic comedy. I can remember sitting in a kino, gnashing my teeth at the scene in Schlaflos in Seattle where Meg Ryan and Rosie O'Donnell get teary-eyed retelling the plot of the Cary Grant movie, An Affair to Remember. What was wrong with Americans? Why did we have to make everything so cute, so smiley-happy-weepy?

Too much Wim Wenders will do this to you.

Back again stateside, I landed amid the late-nineties romantic comedy boom, gnashing my way through You've Got Mail and Notting Hill and My Best Friend's Wedding, until it seemed I might never again smile in delight at the innocence of a kiss. But now comes Bridget Jones and her diary. The movie, if you haven't heard, chronicles a year in the life of a thirty-two-year-old London publishing house underling, taking up her daily worries about her weight, her love life, her weight, her job, her weight--and the great, overarching fear of remaining eternally single and unloved. Like the novel it is based on, a bit of friendly fluff by Helen Fielding, Bridget Jones's Diary plays with Pride and Prejudice--riffing on Jane Austen's famous opening lines, and distracting Bridget with a handsome bounder, Daniel, while awkward, proud Mark Darcy (get it?)--lingers in the background. Will Bridget (Renee Zellweger) can the cad and snatch the catch instead? Guess.

Bridget Jones's Diary isn't just a romantic comedy, but one specially pitched to women ("Total chick flick," a guy in the theater lobby commented), and its mammoth appeal lies in the shrewd decision to serve up not just romance, but a detailed anatomy of "The Bad Day." Bridget endures the nightmare of hideous clothes ("Great," she says, after borrowing a dress from her mother for a party, "I was wearing a carpet.") She suffers through the world's worst hair day. The boss from hell. And on and on. Panic and mortification lurk in every social situation. What do you say at a high-powered publishing party when suddenly you find yourself in conversation with Salman Rushdie? Or when you're the only one to show up to a costume party unaware that the "vicars and tarts" theme has been--oops!--canceled? Director Sharon Maguire brings a comic exaggeration to a young(ish) woman's trials, and to her triumphs too: like telling the jerk you work for exactly what you think of him, then walking off the job; or finally finding a man who looks you in the eyes and says, "I like you--just as you are." That may not be Cary Grant dialogue, but it sure sends a sigh through the audience.

While Bridget Jones's Diary--the novel--bogged down in its heroine's appalling self-absorption, the movie makes Bridget likable, indeed lovable (that's the point, after all), and does so through the very shamelessness of its romantic gambits. It's playful about what it's doing to us, the soundtrack most of all: Bridget preparing for a big date, shaving her legs to Mission Impossible-esque music, or sitting at home alone, drowning her sorrows in red wine and singing along in weepy defiance to Eric Carmen's gooey seventies pop tune, "All by Myself." It might be scary to see how fully pop culture shapes Bridget's dilemmas, moods, and sense of self (she panics while watching Glenn Close's psychotic-because-unmarried performance in Fatal Attraction)--scary, if it weren't so funny.

Bridget Jones's Diary won't rock your world, but it might shake it a little, with laughter. There are hilarious scenes, one involving a public-speaking meltdown (Bridget's), another with her two suitors duking it out, showcasing the hilarious spectacle of Oxbridge street-brawling. Hugh Grant is terrific as Bridget's womanizing boss--incorrigibly witty, casually cynical, his cadaverous good looks hinting at a Dorian Gray-like corruption within. As for Zellweger, doing an English accent (almost Streep-like in its quality, by the way) frees her up, letting her be louder than usual, and less controlled. Bridget drinks too much, and smokes too much, and eats too much; and Zellweger (who gained twenty-five pounds to do the role, which amounts to moral courage for an actress in Hollywood these days) looks the part, doughy and flushed and sloppy. Best of all, she conveys how deeply in the emotion of the moment Bridget is--way up when something goes well, crashing when it doesn't, winning our tender affection. Here's a woman who, while visiting her parents, buttons up flannel PJs and announces, "I'm going to Bedfordshire." Meg Ryan says that line, and I wince. Renee Zellweger says it, and I'm all hers. Go figure.

The Widow of Saint-Pierre is the latest from French director Patrice Leconte, a gloomy, muted piece of work that looks like penance for his having committed the spry comedy of last year's The Girl on the Bridge. The film is set in 1850, in a remote French territory off the coast of Newfoundland, where two fishermen take part in a drunken and pointless tavern killing that results in a death sentence for one of them, Neel Auguste (Emir Kusturica). There's no guillotine in the settlement, however; one has to be sent for from Paris. Meanwhile, the condemned man's rehabilitation is championed by a do-gooding blue-blood couple--the captain of the regiment, Jean (Daniel Auteuil), and his wife Pauline, known as Madame La (Juliette Binoche). Madame La drafts Neel to help build a greenhouse garden; the effort expands to fixing people's houses, and bit by bit Neel becomes a popular figure in the town, his impending execution pitting the populace, led by the eccentric Madame La, against a governor and magistrates bent on "justice."